The health of UK language study is lost in translation

Languages are in decline in UK secondary schools. This is well known and barely counts as news these days. It started well before the Covid pandemic and Brexit piled on additional pressures.

This has had a knock-on effect on universities. The University of Hull is the latest in a growing list of institutions to announce the closure of language degrees. A Times Higher Education article last week with the alarming headline “Languages decline see numbers drop to zero at UK universities” added to a long line of pieces heralding impending doom.

But the figures initially quoted for the universities of Warwick, Southampton and Newcastle baffled colleagues at all three institutions because they bore no relation to the reality on the ground. Why then did the article – and the Ucas figures it was based on – suggest that acceptances had shrunk by so much?  

The answer lies in a shift in student applications away from single-honours degrees and towards combining specialist language learning and a non-language subject. The figures took no account of the fact that students are now much more likely to study two or three languages alongside another discipline than to focus on one language alone.

THE Campus resource: Fostering multilingual student discussion in online classes

Of course that term “alone” is itself misleading. Even a single-honours degree will involve the study of the linguistics, literature, film, politics, art and culture of the countries where that language is spoken. Warwick, in fact, pioneered this type of interdisciplinary degree in the late 1960s. Its founding professors of French (Donald Charlton) and German (Dick Hinton Thomas) wanted to create a new type of language degree that focused on far more than just old novels by canonical writers and abstract translation exercises. Students at Warwick looked at language in context, incorporating philosophy, history and politics, as well as literature. Our most recent additions to our module catalogue are postcolonialism, transnationalism and ecocriticism.

It is a measure of that original vision that departments across the country went on to adopt similar approaches, so that all language degrees now have a broad, interdisciplinary base. And yet we have all seen a move away from the (already) inherently interdisciplinary and in-depth study of one language towards the study of two or three, and away from joint honours in humanities subjects to combinations with the social sciences and the sciences. At Warwick, for instance, you can now study combinations from Italian and history of art to German and business or Hispanic studies and global sustainable development.

Warwick students were always encouraged to go to other departments for modules. But the joint-honours programmes that such arrangements presaged have, in the past 10 years, largely supplanted single-honours courses – despite university language departments’ constant adaptations in terms of who, what and how they teach. Why?

In my view, it is no coincidence that this shift coincides – in England, at least – with the introduction of £9,000 tuition fees, and the concomitant discourse about the relevance and usefulness of degree subjects. The trend is also linked to a broader decline in the numbers of students on humanities degrees (potentially motivated by similarly utilitarian thinking).

But it is also related to the increasingly limited opportunities for language learning in schools. At Warwick, all of our languages can now be taken from scratch because students haven’t always had the opportunity to take an A level in the language they want to study. And beginners are always required to study another subject, too, so there’s something to fall back on if their efforts to learn the language don’t work out.  

It is also important to note that the shift to ab initio study and joint degrees has been accompanied by an increase in numbers studying a language as an optional module across the university. Warwick’s Language Centre, part of its School of Modern Languages and Cultures, is this year teaching 1,400 undergraduates and 900 master’s students – and enrolments have been growing steadily year-on-year.

The impact of Covid and Brexit on the next generation of language specialists will mean that language departments will continue to evolve and diversify. We’ll be supporting schools more than ever through outreach, impact and widening participation, and we’ll be evolving the curriculum further to reflect better the global and diverse contexts in which languages are spoken. Languages are dynamic, after all, so it is only natural that degree patterns have shifted.

The decreasing numbers taking the traditional single-honours route means that students on specialist language degrees may now have the choice of fewer cultural modules but they are increasingly multilingual and transcultural and are more likely to have a specialism in another discipline alongside their in-depth study of the layers and contexts of countries where their chosen language is spoken. This makes them more employable, more flexible and better equipped to adapt to a global working environment.  

More than ever, the UK needs specialist language graduates in order to navigate an increasingly intercultural, cross-cultural and transnational world. For many language departments, Warwick's included, this is a period of transition, rather than one of despair.  

Katherine Astbury is professor of French studies at the University of Warwick.