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Lack of languages stifles Brits and USers | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 33 of 95 10 July 2014 at 4:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I don't see what the fuss is about. It's not that businesses are losing money because of lack of multilingual skills.
It's more that they could be making more money with better language skills. But I really don't see the problem. As I pointed out, if your business does not have international operations, you don't need foreign language skills. Those businesses that deal internationally have already come to grips with the problem. French software firms prospecting in the US make do with the English they know, maybe not to the best effect. US software firms prospecting in France could try to get by with English, after all, "everybody understands English." At some point they will hire some French-speaking staff because if you want to do business in France, you have to speak French. Similarly, I'm sure that all those large Wall street banking firms have lots of multilingual capacity. The question is who is filling those jobs. Most likely it is foreign nationals with English capability due to the large pools of immigrant and heritage speakers in the US and the UK. The multilingual world is already upon some of us. Most people don't need extra languages. But others do. Whether you individually need more languages is a reflection of where you are or want to be in today's world. Edited by s_allard on 10 July 2014 at 5:15pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4831 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 34 of 95 10 July 2014 at 5:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I have some issues with the Guardian (which I subscribe to and read every day), but I
can't let the slur against its journalistic integrity pass unchallenged: Had it not been for the persistence of the Guardian, the whole "phone-hacking" scandal would not have been blown open. The Guardian is far from perfect, but as far as British print journalism is concerned, the Guardian is, by a long way, "the least worst". As for blowing things out of proportion, this article was tucked away in the print edition towards the back, in its weekly Education section. Getting back on-topic, I agree with a lot of what other posters have written, at least in part, but I would add: - For the UK (in contrast with the US), because of its membership of the multilingual EU, it faces both challenges and opportunities which the USA does not, at least not in quite the same way. - While languages may not be a fantastic advantage to the average employee of UK firms as things currently stand, because of the traditional Anglophone-orientation of most British firms and organisations in the past, I wonder what opportunities are being lost and going begging, for lack of more imagination and vision being shown on the linguistic front. Any self-respecting German company which does business outside of German-speaking borders will have a good complement of competent English speakers among its staff. The same is probably not true (mutatis mutandis) of most corresponding British companies, even if they do business in Germany. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 35 of 95 10 July 2014 at 5:12pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Just as a footnote to my previous note, I thought it might be useful to look at industries where multilingualism is
extremely important. Sectors of the travel industry come to mind. I recently took a cruise departing from Fort Lauderdale to the Caribbean and was struck by how multilingual the crew was. But with some nuances. The truly multilingual staff were those who interfaced with the public, the people with the desk jobs, the sales people and the officers in their pretty white uniforms. As for the people in the more low-level jobs that had much less direct contact with the public, the common language was some degree of English. For example, the maître d at the entrance of the restaurant spoke at least four languages very well but the busboy who took away the dishes spoke limited English. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5535 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 36 of 95 10 July 2014 at 5:31pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I'm using my personal experience to make the argument vivid. But my argument actually rests on on various salary studies like the one I mentioned earlier:
A 2% earnings bonus, on average, tells me two things: (1) businesses may say that multilingual employees are nice, but they don't actually care enough to invest money, and (2) for most people who want to live in the US, languages will be a pleasant but unprofitable hobby, or at best a niche specialty that pays about what any other job would pay. If that bonus went up to, say, 15%, I'd happily accept that my experience was atypical. Now, of course, these broad, population-wide averages don't mean that these skills are useless—there are always niches and special situations. And of course, there are hundreds of amazing non-economic reasons to learn a language. If I were motivated solely by economics, I certainly wouldn't study Egyptian. :-)
Well, this makes the problem even harder. If US/UK companies were losing real money, right now, it might be possible to convince them to invest more in multilingual workers. But if this is just a threat somewhere in the future, it's going to be hard to motivate people. First, let's work out some costs. For the sake of argument, let's assume that there are—very roughly—3 million students in each grade of school in the US. Let's also assume that for international trade, we really want C1 speakers. As far as I can tell, traditional school classes take around 10 years to produce a C1 speaker. So at any given point, we'll have 30 million US students enrolled in language classes. That seems like a lot, so let's assume that we focus on a subset of the students, and let the others quit early, giving us 10 million students at a time. If we assume 20 students per class, that means 500,000 teachers. And if every teacher earns US$50K/year with another $50K/year in overhead, that gives us US$50 billion/year. (I don't have a good handle on what teachers cost, but we would need to recruit a huge number of them, which will probably drive up the price.) To put it in perspective, I think the latest GI bill for US soldiers cost us something like $6 to 8 billion/year, and we spend about $1,000 billion/year on education overall. So we could afford this, but it would be a major investment: about 5% of our total education spending to get 1/3rd of our students to C1, or maybe 2/3rds to B1. Then what happens? Well, first of all, the US will have a huge glut of foreign language speakers on the market, driving down any salary bonus. Maybe some of these people would go on to discover new international business opportunities, eventually increasing the demand for multilingual employees, and thereby leading to even more US dominance of the world economy. But there's also a good chance that all those language skills will go unused, and just rust away. Even if we were absolutely certain that English would lose its place on the world stage in 50 years, that's still 50 years of significant educational investments while we're waiting for things to tip.
Well, to borrow your nautical metaphor, boats are expensive to build and maintain. And if we imagine that we'll need a lot more boats in 25 or 50 years, it's going to be really expensive to build them now, and then store them in boatyards until somebody needs them. If nobody's willing to pay for boats right now, and we can't find any way to increase the demand for boats, the boats aren't going to get built. At least not in the US or the UK. Another alternative. We could also bypass the public education system, and create a new system of intensive language courses open to dedicated students, possibly with a scholarship. This has been done pretty successfully in the real world, not just by FSI, but by various countries with aggressive language policies: Learning French in Québec. Government courses with scholarships for immigrants. Language immersion classes: Ulpan courses. Intensive classes for foreigners (and also for immigrants). If we wanted more multilingual US and UK employees, we could always imitate this model. I mean, if the US State Department or the military wants somebody to learn a language, they pay them to take intensive classes. Anyway, I guess this is all just a really long way of saying that I'm not impressed by either the Guardian article, or the two reports they based it on. Their data is vague, and they only looked at help-wanted advertisements. They didn't look at salaries at all. I really do think that if there's huge demand for language skills, and if there are very few people available to fill those jobs, then it really should be visible in salary data. If there's a crisis, it's somewhere off in the future, and nobody knows when it will arrive. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4536 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 37 of 95 10 July 2014 at 6:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
and that the lifetime worth for a US graduate learning a language is:
And the same article in the Economist also states:
So it's not like learning a language is not worth any money to the individual over time. German is seen as more valuable because it is an important trade language and fewer people speak it in the US, so your skills are in higher demand. Makes me think that parents who make their kids learn Mandarin for financial reasons might be on to something. Anyway I take away a quite different message from the same Economist article. Edited by patrickwilken on 10 July 2014 at 6:59pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5378 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 38 of 95 10 July 2014 at 7:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I am surprised that nobody seems to be talking about the fact that the CUSTOMERS are the issue. They are not willing to pay extra for the service. They signal to the businesses what they are willing to pay for. If a company offers them an extra service for a slight premium and the business grows as a result other businesses are going to do the same thing and offer the additional service. Businesses will go bankrupt, on the other hand, if they offer an extra service that costs them money and makes minimal difference in the demand of their customers. That is what really drives whether or not businesses are going to invest in employees who can speak additional languages.
The reason US citizens are not employed in call centers is because the customers do not want to pay all the extra money. If a "social conscious" call center decided to hire all Americans and pay them a large salary they would simply go out of business because nobody would want to pay that much for those services... they would drive all their customers away. Obviously this does not hold true for every single situation, but, on average this is what is happening. Why all the focus on the choices of the businesses and not the consumers who are really driving the entire chain of events? Businesses are just responding to the demands (and lack of demands) of their customers and potential customers. Why don't the customers really demand other languages? Why do the customers really seem to be putting up so much money for English speaking services? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 39 of 95 10 July 2014 at 8:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Given that most North Americans will never in the foreseeable future have use for a foreign language, why even
bother teaching foreign languages at all? Know that language skills are particularly valued in private upper-class institutions, why not eliminate foreign language teaching from the public system? I'm not being facetious here. Considering that the foreign language skills of high school graduates are pretty dismal, why not scrap the whole thing and concentrate in the minority who actually will need those skills? This, in my opinion, is nearly the current state of language teaching in the public school system in much of North America and, I suspect, in the UK. Foreign languages are a subject like any other. There is no intention of producing actual speakers of the language. If I look French in the Canadian school system, we see, unsurprisingly, that the upper-class private schools emphasize bilingualism and, in some cases, trilingualism. Here is a typical elite private school, Collège des Marcellines, with heavy emphasis on learning languages and an "international" perspective. Then we have the public school system where French is very important in the English-language school system here in Quebec. Outside Quebec there is the basically useless traditional teaching of French as any subject. And then we have immersion French schools that are immensely popular because parents have become aware of the economic value of bilingualism. But keep in mind that immersion French classes are still a minority. My analysis is that outside Quebec, only a minority of high school and university graduates will be truly proficient in French, with overrepresentation from the private schools. These students will have a significant advantage in those jobs the require bilingualism. For example, it is very striking how many English-speaking politicians in Canada, and particularly cabinet ministers, now speak excellent French. They are pure products of immersion French and private schools. The situation in Canada is of course very different from that of the US. In the latter case, as emk has pointed out, it doesn't make sense to invest heavily in language courses in the public school system considering that the majority of students will never need foreign languages. But some will. And, just like their Canadian counterparts, certain US parents will seek out immersion schools and those private schools that do emphasize language learning because some parents feel that this leads to a brighter future. As an aside of interest to us HTLALers, the emphasis here is learning of languages at an early age during that "critical period" whether one actually believes in it or not. Only the poor and ignorant believe that languages are not important and can be learned just as well at a later age. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 40 of 95 10 July 2014 at 8:31pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I want to take issue with the economic value of foreign language proficiency, especially in the US job market. I
think that the figures are probably correct when one looks at aggregate values, i.e. the salaries of English- Spanish bilinguals vs all English-speaking monolinguals. I suspect that, unlike Canada, there is not a long tradition of paying a bilingualism premium. So, many people with foreign language skills are not paid any more than their monolingual counterparts. I'm thinking particularly of people in public service. The other side of this issue whether foreign language skills make a difference getting a job or not. In Canada, this is quite clearcut. Bilingualism can be a prerequisite for many jobs. Obviously, in the US this is not the case, but I'm sure that there certain kinds of jobs where foreign language skills represent an edge. So the issue isn't whether French gives you 2% more salary but whether it gives you a job or not. All though the evidence may be just anecdotal, my observation is that all people with high-functional foreign language skills are very glad and grateful to have acquired such skills because they have had opportunities to use those skills either professionally or personally. Edited by s_allard on 10 July 2014 at 8:32pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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