A softer spot for polyglots

10th February 1995, 12:00am

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A softer spot for polyglots

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/softer-spot-polyglots
Danish six-year-olds go to school for 565 hours a year, Italians for 900. Anne Corbett analyses new European data. English is still the language most young Europeans learn in school and college. But Anglophones are not having it all their own way.

The Key Data study shows, unsurprisingly, that English is the choice of 65 per cent of those in the 15-24 age group. English has overtaken French as the foreign language most taught in Spanish and Italian schools, and the two are neck-and-neck in Portugal.

But the study also shows more of the EU’s pupils are learning more languages - in the plural. What is more, two in every three claim to be able to speak another language. Forty years ago the figure was one in three. Only 11 per cent of under-25s do not tackle what the French call “a living language”.

The rise of English - taught to only 21 per cent of pupils 40 years ago - has not been accompanied by an absolute fall in any other EU language. The proportion learning French has gone up in the same period from 18 to 39 per cent, the proportion learning German from 10 to 21 per cent. For Spanish the rise is 6 to 11 per cent.

The Danes, who now expect every school-leaver to be at least bilingual, learn significantly more German (the percentage has risen from 48 to 92 per cent in a single generation); 40 per cent have been taught French; 12 per cent have learnt Italian, while 97 per cent have been taught English. Ninety per cent of the Dutch learn English; 70 per cent learn French too.

By way of comparison, French is taught to 77 per cent of British students, German to 39 per cent, Spanish to 9 per cent, Italian 3 per cent.

Key Data says nothing directly about the effectiveness of language teaching. But it is clear that the good language-speakers learn early and over recent years every EU member state, bar the UK and France, have made a foreign language compulsory in primary school. Next year France will too.

Luxembourg tops the league table for the amount of time committed to foreign language teaching with 255 hours a year for six-year-olds, 381 hours for nine-year-olds, 120 hours at 13 and 180 at 16. Greece has 79 per annum regardless of age, Portugal 85, Italy 100.

Denmark, a rich country committed to linguistic pluralism, increases language teaching with age, programming 210 hours a year for 16-year-olds - or roughly what it allocated to mother-tongue teaching at nine. The Netherlands allocates 200 hours at 16.

English is compulsory in Denmark from the age of 10, in the Netherlands between 10 and 12 and in Greece from eight. In Italy, Luxembourg, Spain and the Brussels region of Belgium a foreign language becomes compulsory between 10 and 12. It is at an experimental stage in the French-speaking parts of Belgium, in Germany, France, England and Wales, and optional in primaries in Germany, Portugal and the rest of Belgium.

Britain is relatively generous to sixth-formers taking a foreign language - four hours a week is typical. But in the 1980s Britain was the only EU member state not to make a foreign language compulsory at any stage of schooling. Only the national curriculum changed that.

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