Briggs #2- Multilingual secondary education in the EU

Date of search: November 29, 2009

Topic: Though I had a lot of resources and information on network neutrality in the European Union, I decided to change my topic to multilingual education. My initial research question is: What resources does the European Union offer to foster multilingual citizens through secondary education?

Where I searched: EUROSTAT
Search terms: "language education"

Result: 28 results, they all look interesting and provide data on how much is being spent on foreign language learning, which languages are being learned (English, French, German, Spanish, for the most part), and even adult foreign language education.

Useful for the paper: Statistical Office of the European Communities (Eurostat). "Foreign languages learnt per pupil" (2009). This and the 2007 edition of Cultural Statistics from EUROSTAT provides actual data to look at. In secondary sources these statistics are often used. Since the data comes from the European Commission's Statistical Office, I would say that the author is rather authoritative. What's nice is that the metadata for this dataset describes the data collection methods. However, the data reflects a much larger population set than what I want to focus on, so there is a fair amount of sifting through information to do.

Where I searched: Professional Development Collection from EBSCO, via the ESSL website.
Search: "LANGUAGE & education" as the subject term and "europe" as a keyword

Result: 30 results.

LITTLE, DAVID "The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Perspectives on the Making of Supranational Language Education Policy." Modern Language Journal 91.4 (2007): 645-655. Professional Development Collection. EBSCO.

Modern Language Journal is a refereed academic journal and is devoted to research and discussion about the learning and teaching of foreign and second languages. Based on the citations within the article itself, it appears that David Little has published a lot on the topic of a European Framework for language education. This article is comprised of several sections by different authors, all cite him and he definitely cites himself. David Little is a fellow emeritus in Applied Linguistics at the Trinity College in Dublin. He has acted as a consultant to the Council of Europe many times, especially with the European Language Portfolio initiative. He also has experience learning languages himself, as he is fluent in both French and German. This article was great for learning about the framework for foreign language education, as well as gaining perspectives and criticism on it.

Ushioda, Ema "Language Motivation in a Reconfigured Europe: Access, Identity, Autonomy." Journal of Multilingual & Multicultural Development 27.2 (2006): 148-161. Professional Development Collection. EBSCO. Web. 29 Nov. 2009.

Ema Ushioda has often co-authored papers with David Little. She is an associate professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick. She has experience both researching foreign language education and actually teaching foreign languages, English in Japan. The journal is a cross-disciplinary academic journal that focuses on sociology and social psychology of language, in language and cultural politics, policy, and planning and practice. I chose this article because it touches on identity, which is interesting to consider when language and national identity is often tied together yet there's a push to learn new languages.

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So far my research has lead to this answer to my initial question: The European Union provides a framework and funding for foreign language learning in secondary education. This funding often appears through programs such as the Comenius Programme. Right now I'm working on positioning my paper to answer further questions on inequities in foreign language education across the EU (90% of Luxembourg students study 3+ languages, most other countries have 1 foreign language learned by the majority) and how the EU works to recruit native speakers who are also excellent teachers to teach abroad. The teacher question is proving a little difficult to find via the literature, but I have a hunch that the answer is out there and it's up to me to find it.