Where are the policies for language ed in the EU?

June 4, 2011 3:25 AM

How do I find policies that are actually in use, not future or the past? Specifically: How can I find EU actually-in-use policies (and if possible, if it's actually happening on the ground) in regards to second language education.

I want to find what the actual policy is, NOW, and how the Union as a whole is going with meeting that, (or specific countries)

I've found an interesting future looking article that suggests that every EU citizen should be
a) fluent in their own language and culture (mother tongue)
b) a second language (and culture): a second mother tongue
(of own choice)
c) a trade language (such as English or French) that they are competent in (if not fluent in culture, literature etc. A business language.)
and that it should be grass-roots community initiated- the article was a bit utopian, which makes me wonder:

Is this what is happening now?

This is for a paper on SLA (second language acquisition) in Australia, and my supervisor has asked me to include some info on Europe, to compare. As I said I found the future looking article, but I'm having trouble finding: "right now, this is the policy" for the EU.

Google has failed me, my library's website has failed me, please help!

posted by titanium_geek to education (2 answers total)

Apologies if you've already done this, but have you looked through the European Commission's website on this? Specifically, the Multilingualism policy page seems to have some possibly relevant documents. The main page for Multilingualism might also be helpful.
posted by brambory at 3:43 AM on June 4, 2011

Ah! HA! thanks brambory. I had looked at the EU website, but not in that part.

It's the Multilingualism page that looks to be the most useful. I can't believe I didn't find it before!

Are there any studies on how the different countries are going (towards the goal of +2 languages) beyond this one, which is due to be published in 2012?

But thanks. I wanted to make sure that the document I found with the 2+ languages wasn't being overly utopian- I have now confirmed that it *is* policy.

and now I feel like I need to pick up a trade language. And write about how we're really dropping the ball, because we're failing at doing the everyone +1 language thing!
posted by titanium_geek at 4:06 AM on June 4, 2011