Pace of change in languages

As the summer comes in at last, the pace of change in the UK languages world is accelerating. The Westminster government is planning to bring in a new curriculum in English schools, while the Scottish government is committing itself to the European target of enabling people to learn two languages as well as their mother tongue. In both cases, the practical implications have yet to be worked out in detail, and there will surely be some real advances as well as potential drawbacks.

In higher education, there are positive moves too. In England, the Routes into languages programme is gearing up for another three years, with new priorities, the government has put a lot of money into helping students to take a year abroad and there is a possibility of a further HEFCE funded initiative to support the capacity of the sector to provide suitable language courses. Language electives are popular, but language degrees are still getting fewer applications and further closures of departments are in the news.

Many organisations are now pitching in to promote the cause of languages. The British Academy’s work on policy is producing a number of useful reports and materials, most recently, their booklet Talk the Talk (http://www.britac.ac.uk/policy/Talk_the_Talk.cfm) offers students a guide to their prospects using languages. The British Chambers of Commerce highlighted the major shortfall in foreign language skills within the business community that is hampering exports (http://www.britishchambers.org.uk/press-office/press-releases/duplicate-of-bcc-knowledge-gaps-and-language-skills-hold-back-exporters.html#.UdJ9JetAHfI). The British Council, the European Commission, the Foreign Office and many other bodies are weighing in too. It is getting to be a crowded field.

LLAS is supporting the Speak to the future campaign for languages, which has a role in keeping communication between all the different bodies involved in the languages issue, as well as its own forthcoming campaigns. It will launch a ‘1000 words’ challenge, encouraging people to learn other languages to a useful level, and will also promote moves to accredit achievement in home languages.

The new academic year will see the relaunch of Routes into Languages and the LLAS/UCML annual ‘Thriving’ workshop for Heads of Department in September.

The Language Show will have high profile seminars in October. And both the British Council’s International Education Week and the British Academy’s Festival of Languages are planned for November. The autumn is going to be busy

Languages for inclusion

As social inequalities continue to deepen, languages are emerging as a key element in inclusion and exclusion. Because languages are potent carriers of identity, the language choices that individuals make tend to express the way they see themselves. In the case of school students, choosing to learn a language often expresses confidence in their ability to take opportunities outside their own close circles. It expresses their potential to work and travel around the world and to interact with strangers. Conversely, a lack of confidence can inhibit students from learning a language that may seem difficult and certainly seems different.

Turning this argument around, it is also clear that when students do make progress in language learning, it gives then the kind of confidence that will help them to face the challenges and opportunities in the world. Since education has the task of building this confidence, there is a strong argument for giving all students the language advantage. Governments in the UK, and some teachers, have been reluctant to embrace the need to make languages compulsory for all students during a substantial part of their studies, though some progress has been made in primary language learning. Pressure still needs to be kept up to extend language learning through the teenage years, when confidence issues are a key to educational and social development.

Meantime, the efforts of teachers in school and university to motivate language learning need to be intensified. Encouragement will have to serve where compulsion is lacking. Fortunately there are many people working hard to provide this and LLAS will continue to work to promote language learning. Through the Routes into Languages programme, which we lead, nearly 80 universities across England Wales are collaborating with secondary schools to reach thousands of school students and encourage them to keep up their language studies. There are many examples of sustained interventions that have made a real difference in disadvantaged schools. Of course, this requires resources, but publicly funded support for our young people is a valuable investment that will enable them and the country to face the future with greater confidence.

Languages for public benefit

Travelling around Europe recently, it has been very humbling to see how difficult life is for colleagues in other countries. A Greek colleague has had a 65% reduction in salary; a Portuguese colleague had a 36% reduction; while an Irish colleague had ‘only’ a 25% pay cut. And alongside that, posts are being cut and departments closed. For all the austerity we are suffering in the UK, we are still relatively protected. Wisely, the government has maintained the funding for education and research at a level that many European colleagues might envy. It will certainly benefit the future prosperity of our country if it can be sustained.

Within this picture, there is now a reconfiguration of priorities, which poses challenges for the whole area of arts and humanities. The periodic jostling for public funding now means that the ‘soft’ subjects have to justify the resources devoted to them alongside the ‘hard’ sciences. This is the context for the AHRC’s new strategy, entitled The Human World. It affirms the value of arts and humanities research, and argues that the people, skills and research that it supports interact with public life to bring cultural, intellectual and economic benefits to the UK.

The argument is an important one, and reflects a change of emphasis that brings the need for public impact into the centre of our concerns, rather than sitting on the periphery as ‘nice-to-have’ side effects. Those colleagues currently grappling with REF submissions will be all too aware of this. The new emphasis is not specific to the UK, but is now the settled view of governments across Europe. The growth and jobs agenda will be an increasing feature of research funding from every source. The challenge is for us to develop compelling arguments without abandoning our core values.

The arguments may be more familiar to languages people than to other disciplines in the humanities since we have had to argue the case for our subject endlessly over the past twenty years or so. The signs are that we shall have to redouble our efforts in this if our subject is to survive for the next twenty years.

Chilly times for languages in England

The New Year has started amid the seasonal snow and ice with the chill spreading to higher education in England through falling student applications. The climate is chillier still for languages, which seem more affected by students’ economic anxieties than other subjects. There is irony in this since graduates from languages degrees have traditionally fared better in the job market than most of their peers (other than medicine and law). And recent surveys of employers have particularly emphasised the value of languages and of the experience of living abroad.

Languages may also be suffering from the resurgence of anti-European sentiment in parts of the English political landscape. Just as language degrees boomed in the run up to the Single Market in the 1990s, they are now dipping in the isolationist mood of the 2010s. The ironies in this are that the economic prospects of the UK are intimately bound up with those of our closest neighbours and increasingly dependent on a globalising world where many of the new powers are not English-speaking.

No doubt there is a cyclical aspect to all of this and perhaps the chill will be followed by a thaw. But languages are not a separate domain from the rest of society and the stance of 'going it alone' brings with it a tendency not to talk to anybody, and certainly not in their language. Languages come into their own when the trend of European and international relationships is to build on partnerships and collaboration rather on confrontation.

Languages at War

Language is an issue in almost every aspect of conflict: in training and preparation for action, in intelligence work, in talking to people on the ground and in different military units communicating with each other. I studied the UN and NATO actions in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s, when Yugoslavia was breaking up in a messy succession of regional and ethnic conflicts. It started as a peacekeeping operation and ended as a large scale rebuilding of the country. Winning hearts and minds was at the centre of the operations, and you can’t do that if you can’t communicate.

In practice, the military rely heavily on local people to act as intermediaries, interpreting and translating for them. But it is often a difficult relationship, when the military don’t know how much to trust the people they employ locally, and the local interpreters don’t know how they will be regarded by their own people. It can be a dangerous job and they can face an uncertain future when the military move out.

The military need at least some personnel to have a good knowledge of the local languages, but that is a big commitment for individuals and a big investment by the forces, who in practice will only ever be able to train a small number of specialists. Of course, they need a larger number of officers and troops who are able to communicate at a basic level. We also discovered that multinational forces are now the norm, and they work in a multilingual environment, even where there is a lingua franca such as international English.

We interviewed more than 50 people who had been involved in the Bosnia operation, military and civilians. We were wowed by their stories and collected a lot of lessons that need to be learned. We are discovering that it is not easy to transfer the lessons from one conflict to another. But we have succeeded in putting language issues on the radar for British military planners, and for the Imperial War Museum, who both helped us with the research. And we have sparked more researchers to study languages in conflict.