Foreign language
Encyclopedia : F : FO : FOR : Foreign language
A foreign language is a language not spoken by the indigenous people of a certain place: for example, English is a foreign language in Japan. It is also a language not spoken in the native country of the person referred to, i.e. an English speaker living in Japan can say that Japanese is a foreign language to him or her.
Some children learn more than one language from birth or from a very young age: they are bilingual. These children can be said to have two mother tongues: neither language is foreign to that child, even if one language is a foreign language for the vast majority of people in the child's birth country. For example, a child learning English from her English mother in Japan can speak both English and Japanese, but neither is a foreign language to her.
Foreign language education and ability
- See main article: Language education
In some countries, learners have lessons taken entirely in a foreign language: for example, more than half of European countries with a minority/regional language community use partial immersion to teach both the minority and the state language.
In 1995 the European Commission’s White Paper on Education and Training emphasized the importance of schoolchildren learning at least two foreign languages before upper secondary education. The Lisbon Summit of 2000 defined languages as one of the five key skills.
Despite the high rate of foreign language teaching in schools, the number of adults claiming to speak a foreign language is generally lower than might be expected. This is particularly true of native English speakers: in 2004 a British survey showed that only one in 10 UK workers could speak a foreign language. Less than 5% could count to 20 in a second language, for example. 80% said they could work abroad anyway, because "everyone speaks English". In 2001, a European Commission survey found that 65.9% of people in the UK spoke only their native tongue.
Since the 1990s, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages has tried to standardize the learning of languages across Europe.
Research into foreign language learning
In 2004 a report by the Michel Thomas Language Centre in Britain suggested that speaking a second language could increase an average worker's salary by £3,000 a year, or £145,000 in a lifetime. Further results showed that nine out of 10 British companies thought their businesses could benefit from better language skills.Also in 2004, a study by University College London (UCL) examined the brains of 105 people who could speak more than one language. The study found that people who learned a second language when younger had denser grey matter than those who learned one later. Grey matter is the part of the brain where information is processed.
Other research has shown that [early exposure] to a second language increases divergent thinking strategies, helping not only in language-related tasks, but also in areas such as math. Children early on have different ways of expressing themselves, such that they better understand there is more than one way to look at a problem and that there is more than one solution.
See also
- First language
- Second language
- Bilingual
- Early foreign language exposure
- Language education
- Language school
- Teaching English as a Foreign Language
- English as an additional language
External links
- [Learning English as a foreign language]
- [Basic Foreign Language Learning]
- [Mentalcode Customized Memory Exercises], a free, web-based flashcard program especially for learning foreign languages.
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