The Teaching of Foreign Languages in Europe

The European Commission is very keen to promote language learning and linguistic diversity across Europe so as to improve basic language skills. It is working with national governments to meet an ambitious goal: enabling citizens to communicate in 2 languages other than their mother tongue. This “Barcelona objective” was agreed in 2002 by the EU’s heads of state and government. 1995 European Commission’s White Paper “Teaching and learning – Towards the learning society”, stated that “upon completing initial training, everyone should be proficient in two Community foreign languages”. The Lisbon Summit’2000 defined languages as one of the five key skills.

Through Erasmus+ and some other programmes the EU supports language learning because: a) better language skills enable more people to study and/or work abroad, improve their job prospects and enhance their career opportunities; b) speaking other languages helps people from different cultures understand one another – essential in a multilingual, multicultural Europe; c) to trade effectively across Europe, businesses need multilingual staff; d) the language industry – translation and interpretation, language teaching, language technologies, etc. – is among the fastest growing areas of the economy.

More than 60 official languages are spoken in Europe, a continent with an extraordinary linguistic variety, which is destined to be increased due to the recent immigration flows. The 2017 edition of the Key Data on Teaching Languages at School in Europe, reports on the main educational policies concerning teaching and learning of foreign languages in 42 European educational systems. Different sources were used to draw up the report: qualitative and quantitative data respectively of Eurydice and Eurostat; and OCSE/PISA and TALIS international surveys. Eurydice data covers all the European Union countries and Bosnia-Herzegovina, Switzerland, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Montenegro, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Norway, Serbia and Turkey.

In almost all European countries, English is the most taught foreign language in primary and secondary education. At EU level, in 2014, almost all pupils (97.3%) studied English during lower secondary education. In addition, the percentage of pupils learning English at primary level increased at EU level by 18.7 percentage points since 2005, reaching 79.4%. French is the second most commonly studied foreign language in the lower secondary level, (33.3% of EU students in 2014). German is the third most popular foreign language (23.1%), followed by Spanish 13.1%.

Most countries use the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (QCER), developed by the Council of Europe to define competence levels in foreign languages that are internationally comparable. At the end of upper secondary education, most countries require at least a B2 level (Upper intermediate – independent user) in the first foreign language. Several countries set a B1 level (Intermediate – independent user). Italy is one of the few countries that requires its students to have reached at least a B2 level at the end of upper secondary education, both for the first and for the second foreign language.

Although some countries mandate that students learn English as their foreign language, the portion of pupils studying it remains high across the board, even in countries without this rule. French and German were the next-most popular languages in most countries, with Spanish and Russian also widely taught as foreign languages in certain regions of the continent. The percentage of students learning some other language was below 5% in most countries.