Brussels, 11/02/2005 (Agence Europe) - Learning a foreign language from primary school onwards is becoming more common: today, 50% of young Europeans have started learning a second language before entering secondary education, as advocated by the Barcelona Council of March 2002. This is one of the findings of a report by the European network Eurydice on the key figures surrounding language teaching in Europe, supported by the European Commission and with contributions from Eurostat for the harmonised statistical data. The reference school year is 2002/2003. “In an enlarged and multilingual Europe, learning foreign languages from a very young age allows us to discover other cultures and better prepare for occupational mobility”, says Jan Figel, Commissioner for Education, Training and Culture. Among the results of the study are the following: 1) few children have a bilingual background, speaking a different language at home and at school. The number of such children is negligible in all Eurydice member states apart from Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania; 2) foreign language teaching is obligatory everywhere except Ireland and Scotland and where it is obligatory, all pupils must continue with a foreign language until the end of their compulsory education except in Italy and Wales; 3) this teaching generally becomes compulsory at secondary level, but it is compulsory at primary level in Luxembourg (80% of pupils are affected), Estonia, Sweden and Iceland; 4) English, French, German, Spanish and Russian account for 95% of the languages learned at secondary level in the majority of countries; 5) English is the most widely-taught language at primary level everywhere apart from Belgium and Luxembourg. The same is true for secondary education, English having experienced a marked increase in central and eastern European countries between 1998 and 2002. German (in northern, central and eastern Europe) and French (in southern and German-speaking countries) share second place; 6) at primary level, language teaching is generally carried out by non-specialists. Such teaching is the responsibility of language specialists from lower secondary level onwards.
Every two years, Eurydice will review the statistics in this report, which gives an overview of the situation in thirty European countries using 37 indicators. (The full report is available at: http: //http://www.eurydice.org/Doc_intermediaires/indicators/en/frameset_key_data.html )