OU blog

Personal Blogs

Patrick Andrews

Language learning and Brexit

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Patrick Andrews, Friday, 1 Mar 2019, 15:03

There have been many depressing reports of a decrease in the number of people studying languages.  This is reflected in this article

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/01/britain-learning-languages-brexit--education

An interesting point is that "more than half (58%) of UK adults wish they hadn’t let the language skills they learned at school slip, 77% agree that language skills increase employability and just over half (53%) regret not having made the most of studying languages when they had the chance."

It is to be hoped that Brexit does not happen  but it seems that the lack of encouragement to learn languages and to understand other cultures may have been a factor in causing the referendum result.

Permalink Add your comment
Share post