While the rest of the world is determined to learn English, the interest of our students in foreign languages is diminishing. Throughout the last few decades, the number of secondary students who sign up for Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) has been declining year upon year. Since 2004 (the year in which MFL ceased to be obligatory after year 9) the numbers have collapsed dramatically. As a consequence, there is less and less interest in studying MFL at university and many universities have responded to this lack of demand by closing their language faculties.

Of course, there have been many reports that have tried to throw some light upon this declining linguistic interest on the part of English youth, but these assessments don’t go to the nub of the matter; they simply serve to create more confusion. For example, every year the British Council publishes a report entitled, Language Trends England which examines the trends of MFL in state primary and secondary schools. In 2020 the British Council published a special report on the generalised disinterest towards MFL amongst English adolescent boys (two thirds of language students in this country are girls). The report lists the social factors which have a negative effect on the language learning of adolescents and identifies the typical boys who come out badly:

• they are from poor families
• they don’t speak another language at home
• they live in a “problem” postcode
• they have special educational needs 

Well. What a surprise! Who would have imagined?

However, these are not reasons for poor performance in language classes. They are only corollaries present in the lives of students in England who, generally speaking, don’t do well in this subject.

What is not mentioned in the report is that these are not negative and decisive factors in other countries where English is studied as a second language. Throughout the rest of the World children of both sexes of monolingual families who live on the fringes of society strive to learn English. And they do so because they understand that their knowledge of this language is the key to a more prosperous future. Even the youngest know that their principal aim is the acquisition of a good standard of English.

For example, in Indonesia there is a well-known language textbook entitled, Learn English for a Better Life. Indonesian children know that if they prioritise the study of this second language they will be prepared for work in all of the many sectors of the economy in which English is employed:

• in tourism
• in the hospitality industry
• in computing
• in business
• in interpretation and translation

It doesn’t matter that one comes from a poor neighbourhood, from the slums, from the rings of poverty that surround the prosperous centre of the city, for everybody understands the importance of this language and works hard to learn it.

So, what is the real reason that English adolescents, especially the boys, are not interested in languages?

The British Council report is addressed to all the educational institutions of the country. The British Council is a very positive and well-intentioned organisation and as such it does everything it can to suggest how we might reverse this situation which is going from bad to worse. In order to produce a change for the better, the report headlines two essential prerequisites:

• The senior management teams of secondary schools have to make the study of MFL obligatory
• The quality of language teaching has to improve

The report includes examples of various secondary schools that have, to a certain extent, overcome the difficulties faced by underprivileged children. It includes a summary of their good practices which the British Council commends to all schools:

• more hours of tuition and conversation
• extracurricular activities 
• more employment advice 
• visits to relevant places 
• smaller classes 
• classes open to all

The problem with all these recommendations is that:

• we’ve already done most of these in the past without great results
• and they cost money. Secondary schools don’t have unlimited budgets. They get £5000 for each student from the government. If 20 of them leave to do Business Studies in another school, the loss to their previous school is £100,000. So what do head teachers do? They are not made of money. They have to cut their coat according to their cloth. They need to keep the highest number of students possible. It’s simple. What they do is take out MFL and put in Business Studies
• Even more importantly, British public opinion doesn’t believe the extra hours of tuition are worth it and the students and their parents have already realised that they don’t have to learn any other language because they are already native speakers of the World’s number one common language

On the rare occasions that the English go abroad on holiday they know full well that the people there have already learnt how to interact with them in English. Why the hell should they need to learn any other language if everybody else speaks theirs? And if the unlikely happens and the locals don’t speak English, then the monolingual holidaymakers have an app that can translate anything. Moreover, it does it in a flash and not only responds on their behalf, it pronounces everything properly.

The inability to speak foreign languages doesn’t mean that English children are lazy, rude or ignorant. Neither is it true that the fact that they don’t communicate in Spanish, French, Mandarin or Arabic is an obstacle to the competitiveness of the British economy, as many educationalists insist. If British industry produces innovative merchandise, if it continues to manufacture inventive and effective goods that resolve difficult technical issues and does it all at a reasonable cost, if the banking and financial services sector maintain their positions of dominance in the market, the World will go on knocking at Britain’s door, happily ordering our goods and services in English.

Reports by august bodies of educationalists such as the British Council don’t always take into account the basic sociological fact that we don’t study other languages because we no longer have to do it. The simple unvarnished truth is that in England, the possession of a second language serves no economic purpose in itself.

The irony is that the British Council is, to some extent, the author of the problem it is trying to solve. It is a global body funded by the British government whose main role is the popularisation and teaching of English as a foreign language: a role that it has fulfilled for nearly a century all over the World with very good results, helping to maintain and reinforce English as the World’s lingua franca, the universal language of the planet and, in its own words «the key to unlocking a whole new world of opportunity». Its campaign to teach the World to speak English has been so successful that the English no longer see the need to learn any other language. Modern foreign languages have become redundant as the World has opted for our linguistic system as its common tongue.

What do you think?