Give me action rather than fine vision

Revival in language teaching needed, and Chinese needs to be part of that

We British are not best known for our enthusiasm for learning foreign languages. It can easily seem a duplication of effort to learn other peoples' languages while they are striving so hard to learn ours. And anyway, which language should we learn?

But the evidence is growing that, if speaking English means that we remain monolingual, we are actually being disadvantaged. A lack of language skills means that young people are less likely to be confident abroad and less likely to take up opportunities to gain the international experience that employers seek. This makes them uncompetitive in the global jobs market.

Lack of facility with other languages also has an impact on the competitiveness of British businesses. A study by Cardiff Business School calculates that the UK economy may be losing 48 billion pounds ($73 billion; 68 billion euros) a year through not speaking the languages of overseas customers.

This is a message that has not been lost on Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne. Both have used visits to China to call for ambitious increases in the number of UK pupils learning Chinese. Unfortunately, the headlines from the prime minister's visit suggested that UK schools should be turning away from teaching languages like French and German and switching to Chinese. This is emphatically not the solution. There needs to be a revival of language learning in which Chinese should have a more prominent position, but alongside, not instead of, other languages that are important to the UK.

The rationale put forward by Cameron and Osborne is economic, and large sections of the British public instinctively understand this. China's economic weight - the size of its population and the potential for further rapid growth - is well known and understood. But an economic argument alone cannot sustain the motivation of an 11-year-old struggling to learn his or her first few Chinese characters. In our research for the British Council we found that although pupils understood the economic case for Chinese, it was the desire to learn more about Chinese culture and a fascination with the language itself that were driving their interest.

And for me, what became the strongest argument in favor of developing the teaching of Chinese was its appeal to different types of pupils from those traditionally regarded as talented linguists. An outstanding learner of French or Spanish is likely to have advanced literacy skills in English, and mastery of vocabulary derived from Latin. These advantages do not apply when learning Chinese, which seems to draw on other types of intelligence such as mathematical skills and visual memory. These findings merit further research, but potentially mean that if schools were to offer Chinese alongside Indo-European languages, the door to enjoyment and success in language learning may be opened to many more pupils.

Chinese is taught by only a small percentage of British schools, and only to a small proportion of pupils within them. So what needs to happen in order to welcome Chinese into the family of languages we teach? In Scotland there is already a plan in operation. A new strategy adopted by the Scottish government to make Scotland a more multilingual country requires pupils to learn at least two languages during their school career, and this is providing the opportunity to develop the teaching of new languages like Chinese. It has been accompanied by a teacher training drive, and resources generously made available by China are being used strategically as part of a long-term plan.

In England, where educational reform puts much more emphasis on the efforts of individual schools, there has not yet been an attempt to corral all the potential resources available into a strategy to develop Chinese. Individual schools decide which languages to teach, but it is not simply a matter of persuading head teachers of the benefits of offering Chinese. To introduce a new language, school managers need to be confident that there will be a supply of well-qualified teachers well-versed in the ins and outs of the education system and the needs of English pupils; fresh recruits from China will not convince them.

In a context where schools as well as pupils are judged on results in public examinations, they also need to be confident that offering Chinese will not have a negative impact on student grades. Parents, too, will need to be convinced that in choosing Chinese, pupils will not put themselves at a disadvantage in gaining the grades they need to get into university.

And finally, the heads of school language departments, the people who need to make it all work in practice, need to have the confidence and skills to manage the introduction of Chinese. They may not need to learn Chinese themselves, but they at least need to understand how learners make progress in Chinese and how this differs from progression in other languages they are used to teaching.

It is good to see our political leaders highlight the need for capacity in languages beyond English. I welcome their ambitious vision for increasing the number of Chinese learners, which has the potential to spearhead a more widespread revival in language learning in English schools. However, in order to achieve the desired goals, we need much more than a vision. Schools alone cannot deliver the government's objectives. We need coordinated actions - particularly in the areas of teacher training and assessment - designed to make that vision a reality.

The author is director of Alcantara Communications, a languages consultancy.

(China Daily European Weekly 11/20/2015 page9)