Another article on why learning extra languages is important for one's career / how to increase bilingual education in countries that use English

Monday, September 22, 2008

A map of the places where French is spoken as a first or second language. In school in Canada we mostly had the impression that French was just a language we were supposed to learn to understand Quebec culture.

Here's an article from today from the Guardian about the U.K.'s (comparatively) miserable language skills and the effect knowing or not knowing a language can have on one's career. Here are some of the interesting parts:
Leonard Orban, the EU commissioner for multilingualism, says that small- to medium-sized companies in the UK are increasingly turning to foreign nationals to fill jobs that call for more than one language.

'British graduates are missing out on some of the best jobs at home and abroad because they are on the whole monolingual,' said Orban, a Romanian who speaks English, French and Italian. 'An English mother-tongue candidate with additional languages has an even more competitive edge, but let's not forget that only about 25 per cent of the world's population speaks English. If you know the local language and culture, you are more likely to clinch that lucrative business deal, so it is an economic problem for Britain as well,' he said.

Likening himself to a doctor helping to cure Britain's poor language skills, Orban said research shows that employers see students with languages as more flexible and better able to build relationships with clients in other countries.
That last sentence is particularly interesting because most people see languages as a limited skill - if you know French it's only good for talking to people in French, the end. The fact is though that knowing an extra language (well, not just knowing one a tiny bit) is often very impressive to a prospective employer, and if people are willing to take extra time to take extra courses to improve their resume they should logically also be willing to impress an employer with an extra language as well, even if it doesn't directly apply to the position they are aiming for.

Not all languages are this helpful however. From the point of view of an employer a year abroad and fluent German = very good; six years abroad and fluent Thai = did this guy just spend over half a decade on the beach? - even if the six years were spent in a university there with no hanging out or drinking at all. Of course, getting some official accreditation during those six years would be prudent, since it's not really that easy to confirm that a person can speak Thai, whereas an employer has a much easier time confirming that a person can actually speak a language like German or French.

The article also gives some hard numbers on the falling number of students in Britain learning other languages:
The British government's decision to allow pupils to drop a modern foreign language at 14 has been blamed for the downturn in GCSE and A-level candidates. The numbers taking GCSEs began to decline in 2002, when Estelle Morris, the Education Secretary at the time, announced that languages would no longer be compulsory for 14 to 16-year-olds from 2004. Many schools pre-empted the policy and stopped entering weaker candidates before the deadline.

The number of 16-year-olds taking GCSE French fell again this year, with 201,940 UK entries compared with 347,007 in 2001. Only 76,695 students sat GCSE German, down from 135,133.

That trend is translating into a fall in the number studying languages at university. Only 610 students started degree courses in German last year, compared with 2,288 a decade ago, according to a study by the School of Oriental and African Studies. The number taking French fell by a third, from 5,655 to 3,700, over the same period.
I doubt this is reversible without a huge amount of effort on the part of both the government and average citizens. In the long term the increasing influence of Spanish and French might help a bit to turn this around, but perhaps not.

Since European languages share so much cultural influence, a better way to teach foreign languages might be to spend some three years studying the influence that other languages have had on English, such as being able to tell what words are Germanic roots, which come from Latin and Greek, and the influence other languages have had on English. This would accomplish two things: 1) Bring a certain familiarity with other languages without having to leave the comfort zone of English, and 2) Hopefully kindle an interest in one or more languages by the end of the three years.

This is also from personal experience: through my few years of French in Canada I and everybody else was more or less given the impression that French is the language of Quebec, and the language that we should learn as good Canadians in order to experience Quebec culture...and that's about it. Almost no emphasis was placed on the fact that French is a language spoken in five continents, that it lets people working in the government for example to make a lot more money than otherwise, that it's spoken in a lot of places in Europe, and that people think you're that much cooler when you speak it. We had very little interest (this was in Calgary) because of the focus on pancakes, maple syrup, and Sol the Clown. No offense to Sol the Clown, but he didn't really make us want to learn French all that much.

Anybody from other parts of Canada that have had good experiences with French class/immersion? I'm sure there are some phenomenal teachers out there and it would be interesting to hear about some of their techniques.

2 comments:

Septem Trionis said...

What you said about learning French in Canada is really interesting ...

In Spain, French used to be the language of choice as for foreign language in secundary education; many people in their forties still don't know English because they learned French in high school (actually current teenagers don't know enough English, but this is a whole other story) ... Nowadays, english is the natural first choice, but French has been largely reintrocuced as a second foreign language (there is a theoretical choice of French, Italian, German and Portuguese, but most students will get a French class).

I had no choice and I had only English at school. I later learned French on my own at a "Escuela Oficial de Idiomas", a kind of state-run languages college where I could study French for 5 years, reaching a theoretical C1 level (European framework) ... French was seen as a "bizarre" choice by many, and actually, as a way to encourage people learning this language, there was a big stress being made on presenting French as a truly "global" language spoken in Canada (we had to watch Quebec-filmed movies) and Africa (we even had to read some books by African authors in French ...

Septem Trionis said...

What you said about learning French in Canada is really interesting ...

In Spain, French used to be the language of choice as for foreign language in secundary education; many people in their forties still don't know English because they learned French in high school (actually current teenagers don't know enough English, but this is a whole other story) ... Nowadays, english is the natural first choice, but French has been largely reintrocuced as a second foreign language (there is a theoretical choice of French, Italian, German and Portuguese, but most students will get a French class).

I had no choice and I had only English at school. I later learned French on my own at a "Escuela Oficial de Idiomas", a kind of state-run languages college where I could study French for 5 years, reaching a theoretical C1 level (European framework) ... French was seen as a "bizarre" choice by many, and actually, as a way to encourage people learning this language, there was a big stress being made on presenting French as a truly "global" language spoken in Canada (we had to watch Quebec-filmed movies) and Africa (we even had to read some books by African authors in French ...

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