MEITS Blog

There is hardly an idea as deeply ingrained and universally shared across academia as the belief in the value of education. Education is a good thing, and the more we can get of it the better. Conversely, lack of education is one of the worst evils. After all, education is our profession, our mission and, to a large extent, our raison d’être.

In October 2015 we organised the first National Languages Workshop in Cambridge, with help from the Cambridge Strategic Research Initiative in Public Policy and the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP). It comprised an open session in the morning with a series of presentations from representatives of different government departments, and a closed session under Chatham House rules in the afternoon. As a result, we produced a policy document, the Value of Languages.

Can you be multilingual if you don’t talk at all? The question may sound paradoxical but it is one that I’ve been asked many times in my work as Speech and Language Therapist. Over the years, I’ve encountered numerous people who do not talk or who can understand and use very few words. This includes people who have had a stroke or traumatic brain injury affecting speech and language systems in the brain, as well as those with intellectual disabilities that have affected the language development process from the earliest days of life. Some of these individuals come from backgrounds where multilingualism is the norm and their families are often concerned about choosing the language that can best support communication and the development of new skills.

Two months ago, my colleague and I drove down to a local school to conduct a pilot study of our research on the influence of identity on foreign language learning for the Education Strand of the MEITS project.

What makes somebody multilingual? Although a very simple question, and one that is often asked as part of Strand 4’s work, it is, in fact, deceptively complicated.

Increasing motivation for language learning in UK schools and encouraging children to maintain their languages study past the point at which they have the chance to stop is an ongoing challenge. One important question here is: to what extent are success and motivation linked to the particular language pupils study?

When a language is threatened, various factors often result in parents not passing it on to their children: it may be spoken by only small portions of the community, and lack resources such as written materials and media provision, making it easier to bring up a child speaking the societally dominant language. Moreover, the apparent economic and social benefits of speaking a more common language tend to be more widely recognised than the advantages of bilingualism—an attitude that the MEITS project as a whole is hoping to change.

June's parliamentary elections in France were a great success for the burgeoning centrist movement founded by Emmanuel Macron with his year-old party La République en marche (LREM) securing 308 seats in the National Assembly, an outright majority in the lower house.