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Global English has dramatically changed the language learning landscape. While the interest in learning English continues to grow worldwide, interest in acquiring other languages is waning. All major Anglophone countries now report foreign language learning crises (Lanvers et al, 2021), while non-Anglophone ones report higher interest in the learning of English, rather than languages other than English (LOTE). This imbalance leads to increasing unintentional gaps between explicit policy (of multilingualism, of learning languages other than English), student preferences, and de facto uptake of language learning.

Can explicit language policy help narrowing this gap, and ensure diversity in uptake and continuation of LOTE? Policy makers in different nations, notably Anglophone and non-Anglophone, have developed different answers to the challenge of reconceptualising rationales for language learning, and safeguarding multilingualism (Cummins, 2021).

In this talk, Dr Ursula Lanvers will discuss conceptual, political and methodological reasons for this multi-layered comparative approach. In the second half, she will present preliminarily findings from Ireland on the analysis of debated versus practiced policies. She will return to the discussion of gaps between explicit, debated and practiced policy, and analyse these in the light of the continuing ‘stampede’ towards English. The final discussion proposes a new matrix for rationales of MFL study, which might offer avenues for safeguarding a diversity in MFL study.

Speaker

Dr Ursula Lanvers is Programme Leader for the PhD Programme in Applied Linguistics at the University of York. Before this, she taught languages and a variety of linguistics courses at the Open University for eight years, specialising on developing distance language learning materials for German in particular.

She completed her PhD at the University of Exeter in Bilingual First Language Acquisition in 1999. She completed her first degree in French, History and Education Studies at the University of Munster, Germany, in 1990, and her PGCE (Modern Languages) at the University of Oxford in 1993.

References

Cummins, J. 2021. Rethinking the Education of Multilingual Learners. A Critical Analysis of Theoretical Concepts. Multilingual Matters.

Lanvers, U., Thompson, A. & East, M. 2021. (eds), Language Learning in the Anglophone countries in the context of global English: challenges, policies, solutions