TEXT 2
THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC GAP IN FOREIGNLANGUAGE LEARNING
Teaching foreign languages has become a major goal for
many education systems around the world. In today’s
increasingly interconnected world, speaking multiple
languages improves employability, fosters respect for
people from other cultures, and gives young people direct
access to content that would otherwise be inaccessible,
including literature, music, theatre and cinema (OECD,
2020a).
For the first time in 2018, PISA asked students whether
they studied foreign languages at school and how much
class time they had on foreign languages per week. Results
show that learning foreign languages is widely available to
15-year-olds in today’s education systems. However, these
opportunities are not evenly distributed among students of
different socio-economic status: students in advantaged
schools have more opportunities to learn foreign languages
than students in disadvantaged schools. These socioeconomic disparities in foreign-language instruction time
are telling as they correlate to inequity in student
achievement in other areas – in reading, for example.
These results suggest the existence of a social divide not
previously measured that leaves some students unprepared
for effective communication with others from different
cultural and language backgrounds.
Excerpt extracted and adapted from:
https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2021/
11/the-socio-economic-gap-in-foreign-languagelearning_c357eab2/953199e1-en.pdf