The British Council's - English Next

In 2006 David Graddol wrote a book for the British Council entitled English Next. The idea was to look at the state of English around the world and predict the future for the language. You can download the whole thing as a pdf file from http://www.britishcouncil.org/learning-research-english-next.pdf but here are a few things I’ve picked up from it.

Did you know that 500 years ago there were 15,000 languages spoken in the world? Today there are fewer than half that number and in the next 200 years that is expected to drop to 1,000. At the moment the top 12 languages account for 50% of the world’s population.

English is not the most spoken native language; it may be fourth behind Madarin Chinese (which is way ahead of the rest), Spanish and Hindi-Urdu with Arabic rising to push it into fifth position by the middle of this century. Perhaps 100 million people are now learning Mandarin as a second language. The ex- British colony of Trinidad and Tobago aims to become Spanish speaking by 2020. So English hasn’t got it all sewn up. In business and on the Internet other languages are growing in importance.

English is, however regarded as a basic skill in many countries along with literacy in the mother tongue, numeracy and IT. Universities have become globalised and up to 2,000 Master’s courses are now offered in English in countries where English is not the first language. Over half the world’s international students are taught in English.

In the 90’s Universities started up eUniversities. Why would you need to physically attend lectures and seminars when you could do it all online from home over the Internet? It didn’t work. Key Asian markets failed to sign up big time, so they came up with another idea. They would open branches and develop agreements with locally based institutions to offer their “brand name” degrees. This is going well and there are now more so-called “transnational” than international students studying with British universities.

We’re all familiar with the terms EFL (English as a Foreign Language) and ESL (English as a Second Language). We’ve also got used to ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) as well as several other terms in the ELT world. If I’m a Mexican in Mexico, I might learn EFL, but once I cross the border to Texas, I’ll learn ESL. We need to add a few more terms to these.

Firstly, CLIL. Content and Language Integrated Learning combines subjects and language so the student is not taught English as a separate subject, but learns say, geography with an English language text book and speaking English in class. Language support is given alongside the subject content. It’s usually practiced in secondary schools where students already have some English knowledge.

ELF – English as a Lingua Franca recognizes that most interaction in the medium of English is between non-native speakers. It focuses on getting messages across rather than complete accuracy.

EYL – English for Young Learners. I started my first foreign language class at school when I was 13. 21% of Japanese 5-year olds went to English language conversation classes in 2005. (In 2000 it was 6%) As children learn more easily at a younger age, the idea is that the next generation will become bi-lingual, as stated, for example by the Prime Minister of Mongolia in 2004 when inaugurating his country’s primary English language programme.

We’ll have a look at the implications of all this for EGL (English as a Global Language) in another article.