Applied Languages

The UK will be held back as it seeks to emerge from recession unless it boosts the number of language graduates, campaigners say. The National Centre for Languages (Cilt) points to a worrying decline in the take-up of modern languages. It wants languages to be treated as strategically significant subjects in the same way that science and maths have been championed.

The government said a review of modern languages was currently under way. Cilt chief executive Kathryn Board said: “English is one of the great global languages but it will only take us so far. Our engagement with the non-English speaking world will remain superficial and one-sided unless we develop our capacity in other languages.”

Recent research from Cardiff Business School suggests improving languages could add an extra £21bn to the UK economy and that export businesses that use language skills boost their sales by 45%.

Cilt’s director of communications Teresa Tinsley said there was a lot of concern that not enough youngsters were taking languages in secondary schools through to university. In 1997, 71% of England’s GCSE pupils took a foreign language, last year the rate was down to 44%. For the most popular foreign languages at GCSE, French and German, take-up declined in England by 45% and 46% respectively between 1997 and 2008.

Whilst at university, the share of home UK students taking modern languages has fallen by 4% since 2002. This happened against a 4.5% increase in the overall numbers of students. Cilt says this decline comes after an even bigger fall in language student numbers in the 1990s.
Ms Tinsley said: “We are going to be held back as a nation as we seek to emerge from the economic downturn or recession. Companies are looking to recruit people with language skills and if they can’t find them amongst our home-grown graduates they will obviously bring in people from other countries to fill these gaps. We really need to buck up our ideas or we are going to be stuck in a mono-lingual world when everybody else is taking global opportunities.”

Language courses at some universities are struggling. The University of the West of England is to stop courses in French, Spanish and Chinese this year because they received only 39 applicants. And Queen’s University Belfast is planning to close its German department.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills said it recognised the value of learning a language for personal development and for people’s future careers. “This is why the government will make language teaching compulsory in primary schools from next year.”

She said the government had expanded a scheme into a national programme encouraging universities and schools to work together to increase language take-up. It was also working with the higher education funding council for England on their review of modern languages and strategically important and vulnerable subjects and would continue to do so.

Read more: BBC News

Inma Gonzalez Puy, president of the Cervantes Institute in Beijing, said China is in demand of more Spanish-speaking talents with professional background under closer ties between China and Spanish-speaking countries.

“As China is having more cooperation in trade and tourism with Spain and many Latin American countries, Spanish begins to enjoy a more eminent position as a foreign language for international communication in China,” said Inma Gonzalez Puy at a meeting to promote Spanish culture and language, adding that the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2010 World Expo both underscore China’s demand for Spanish-speaking talents.

Cervantes Institute is the world’s largest official organization to promote Spanish culture and language education. It has 70 branches in more than 40 countries across the world.

Inma Gonzalez Puy said currently China was in need of people who could speak both Chinese and Spanish and have professional knowledge, and the institute was doing what it could to nourish such talents.

Spanish is the third most spoken language in the world with about 400 million users. However, in the past, not many people in China could speak the language, regarding Spanish as a “minority foreign language” – a general Chinese term given to all foreign languages other than English.

The meeting was part of the five-day 16th Beijing International Book Fair which runs from 3rd September. Spain is a guest of honour in this year’s event.

Read more: Chinaview

Australians risk being marooned in the dated jobs and industries of the 20th century unless a $11.3 billion mass Asian language literacy plan is acted on within a generation, according to Michael Wesley, a leading expert on international relations.

Ahead of today’s Sydney launch of a report documenting “a precipitous decline” in the study of languages at universities, Professor Wesley said it was not enough to rely on a fluent elite to project Australia’s interests in the region. “Simply relying on an elite means the rest of Australian society – as our economy internationalises and becomes more knowledge-intensive – will be trapped in 20th-century industries, while other countries will be moving ahead and taking part in the 21st-century knowledge economy,” he said.

The report from Professor Wesley’s Asia Institute at Griffith University says Mandarin, Japanese and Indonesian should be given priority since they are the languages of Australia’s two largest trading partners and closest neighbour respectively.

Professor Wesley said it was critical for the country’s prosperity that half of all Australians became competent in a key Asian language over the next 30 years. “The world of the future is going to be an Asian-centred knowledge economy, and essential to getting ahead in the knowledge economy is getting our human infrastructure right, and essential to that is being able to speak to people in languages other than English,” he said.

The Griffith report proposes an Australian strategy for Asian language proficiency, under which universities and schools would bid for funding from a new national Asian languages institute to ensure that the number of preparatory, primary and secondary school students taking Mandarin, Japanese or Indonesian is doubled within five years.

Successful bidders would have to commit to ensuring that all students up to year 10 received at least 150 minutes of instruction in the target language a week. After 15 years, the key languages group would be expanded to include Vietnamese, Thai, Farsi, Bengali, Cambodian, Lao and Burmese.

Professor Wesley pointed to World Bank forecasts showing the Asia-Pacific as a leader in the emerging knowledge economy, and contrasted this with the “alarming” finding that 75 per cent of Australians spoke no language other than English.

He said the new pools of talent opening up in the knowledge economy were not in the English-speaking world but in fast-developing Asian nations such as China, Korea, Taiwan and India. “The majority of consumers of knowledge products – from web-based materials to films – will consume products in languages other than English, and will develop knowledge products in indigenous languages, so it stands to reason that countries that can work with these indigenous capacities stand to gain,” he said.

Asked why Australia should embark on such a monumental task in learning foreign languages when English already was the lingua franca of global business, Professor Wesley conceded this was the “key argument” against his proposal. “(But) learning another language is the quickest way to understanding that the way you think about the world is not universal; it’s shaped by your culture,” he said.

Read more: The Australian

Barack Obama’s change train also, as it turns out, includes a push for unilingual Americans to learn a foreign language. Specifically, Spanish. Americans are late to the realisation that the more languages you speak, the better for your business. It is, after all, a global economy.

The importance of a second (or third) language has long been viewed as a plus to help push forward your career, but a recent poll conducted by Harris/Decima for Berlitz Canada shows bilingual and multilingual Canadians have more career options, build stronger relationships with colleagues and clients and get promoted and move up the pay scale faster than their one-language colleagues.

In fact, 66% of respondents said they had a greater range of job options within their field; 62% said being bilingual or multilingual afforded them more flexibility in terms of where they could work; 48% said speaking another language accelerated their career rise; and 44% said speaking more than one language helped them earn more, quicker. This became more true the higher the tax bracket respondents were in.

The findings proved what Darryl Simsovic, president of Berlitz Canada already knew. In the past 10 to 15 years, as Canadian companies have matured and moved into global markets, they have come to accept they can be much more effective if their executives can speak the language when they hit foreign ground, Mr. Simsovic says. He says language goes a long way to building a relationship: “The effort you have made to speak with your host in their own language tells people you want to do business with them and you value the relationship you share with them.”

From a global perspective, “learning a language is as important as earning an MBA. Companies have smaller groups of people at their headquarters and more people going abroad. It gives you an edge. Language can be the thing that sets you apart,” he says.

Read more: Canada.com