An opinion piece by Jocelyn Wyburd in Times Higher Education stresses the need for UK policies to encourage language learning at all levels of education. Entitled “Give Languages a Fair Shout”, the article reminds native speakers of English that the status of English as a lingua franca should not be an excuse for ignoring other languages. Being the Director of the Cambridge Language Centre, Wyburd’s opinion clearly carries weight.
Wyburd adds her voice to others decrying the decline of foreign languages in UK education, reminding readers that language learning not only enhances communication: “a gateway to understanding the world through the words, thoughts and cultures of others”; it has educational, cognitive and cultural value. To her, losing languages means losing “international insight”. She contrasts the situation with that of the rest of Europe, now including Scotland, where educational policy aims at equipping students with two foreign languages while in the rest of the UK only elite schools appear to mandate a foreign language. On a more positive note, Wyburd notes that employment pressures and research needs have motivated some students to pay attention to languages, yet she refers to this as “instrumental” as opposed to “the deeper, more specialist study of languages, cultures and societies, and the accompanying linguistic and intercultural competence.”
Finally, Wyburd supports the efforts of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Languages, with its recently released Manifesto for Languages. The manifesto starts with the following strong statement: “English is an important world language, but the latest cutting-edge research shows that, in the 21st century, speaking only English is as much of a disadvantage as speaking no English.”
So which other languages are important to learn? A BBC article on the “ ‘Alarming Shortage’ of Foreign Language Skills” cites the British Council’s Top 10 Languages, among which Arabic ranks second, after Spanish, followed by French, Mandarin Chinese, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Turkish and Japanese (Languages for the Future). Teachers of Arabic may definitely be happy with this news.
