According to a senior British diplomat, British young people’s poor language skills played a role in the UK’s decision not to stay in the Erasmus+ European student exchange programme after Brexit.
“There’s always been an imbalance between our inability to speak languages very well and therefore to take advantage of the outward mobility opportunities, and people wanting to come to the UK,” Nick Leake told a committee meeting in Brussels, as reported by news site Politico.
Leake commented that this caused a financial burden to the UK, and Erasmus+ proved too expensive. “The interests of the UK taxpayer is why we decided not to participate in Erasmus+,” he said.
But are the British really bad at learning foreign languages? I’m certainly not the first academic researching language learning to ask this question. And there’s no reason to think that British students are any worse than anyone else – but they are let down by an environment that doesn’t prioritise learning international languages.
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