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Thread: "English" In China
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[quote=PINETREE ,22180]Commissioned by the British Council, it says monolingual English graduates 'face a bleak economic future' as multilingual competitors flood the workforce from all over the world.A massive increase in the number of people learning English is under way and likely to peak at around two billion in the next decade, according to the report entitled English Next.More than half of all primary school children in China now learn English, and the number of English speakers in India and China - 500 million - now exceeds the total number of mother-tongue English speakers elsewhere in the world.These new polyglots, and the companies that employ them, have significant competitive advantages over their monoglot rivals, including a vital understanding of different cultures.'The competitive advantage of speaking English is ebbing away,' said the report's author, linguistic consultant David Graddol.'Once everyone speaks English, advantage can only be maintained by having something else - other skills, such as speaking several languages.'At a corporate level, the UK and US economies have been enjoying a huge benefit from having so many English speakers elsewhere in the world,' he said.'They can outsource overseas to India, for example, allowing them to cut costs and boost growth.'But Mr Graddol said there were mounting disadvantages for US and British companies if they stayed monolingual.Companies from other countries could use exactly the same methods to cut costs. And those foreign competitors could trade and take orders in other languages.'We know from trade associations that small and medium-sized British firms are losing a lot of business because they cannot even answer calls from abroad on the switchboard,' he said.'Calls do not get to the right people because the telephone operators do not have the languages needed.'Around 30 per cent of the British population spoke a language other than English, but about half of these people had that other language as a mother tongue, Mr Graddol said.In the US, 22 per cent of the population spoke a language other than English, mainly Spanish, and many of these people had Spanish as their first language, figures from the US Modern Language Association showed.British higher education may already be suffering from being monolingual, Mr Graddol said.The number of foreign, particularly Chinese, students entering British universities was falling as colleges in other parts of the world offered courses in English at lower cost, he said.English-language teaching now earns Britain up to £1.3 billion pounds (S$3.7 billion) directly, and other education-related exports bring in a further £10 billion a year, the report said. -- REUTERS[/quote]
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