16 The Linguist Vol/58 No/3 2019
ciol.org.uk/tl
FEATURES
PRESS NARRATIVES
Are school students
caught in the crossfire,
as the media report on
Brexit (above) and link
Europhobia to the MFL
decline; and could it
affect their motivation to
study languages (right)?
Ursula Lanvers considers 'fake news' and the danger
of talking ourselves out of language learning
A
nyone who still needs convincing of the deeply
political nature of language policies need look
no further than Northern Ireland: a parliament in
deadlock, deeply divided over the position, importance
and visibility of the Irish language. Language policy, how
we learn languages and for what reason, has a habit of
being politicised, especially at moments of seismic
political importance. an example is 9/11: after the event,
the us rationales for language learning shifted
significantly as languages became increasingly
instrumentalised for the purpose of national security.
arguably, Brexit is another seismic political event, so
perhaps it should have come as no surprise when, within
days of the referendum, newspapers and media websites
published articles linking anti-europe feelings to Britain's
unwillingness to learn languages. I asked myself what
links these writers were making between modern foreign
language (mFL) learning in the uk and the Brexit vote –
and whether they stood up to scrutiny.
motivation to learn languages, including uptake at
gcse, a level and university, has been spiralling
downwards among young people for some decades. as
a researcher in language-learning motivation in uk
contexts, I am familiar with the systemic problems
associated with learning and teaching languages in uk
schools. can we link negative attitudes to mFL in a
school environment to the europhobia (and arguably
also xenophobia) expressed in the Brexit vote? What
evidence would we need to support this?
With a group of researchers, I set out to gather
relevant publicly accessible websites and journalistic texts
that appeared in the immediate aftermath (six months) of
the referendum.
1
We found 33 texts, mostly written by
academics, with some by journalists, politicians and
commercial language-learning providers, and submitted
these to a thematic analysis. the results revealed no
clear link between Brexit voting behaviour per uk region
or nation and commitment to language learning,
Brexit: telling stories
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