Yet again, another story lamenting the lack of language skills in the UK...

The lack of language skills of UK graduates and young people is never far from the news, and this time it is being blamed in part for our inability to recover from the recession.

As a language student at university we were constantly being told that with our language skills we would be snapped up immediately by companies looking for multilingual grads. Unfortunately they forgot to say that if you were following a degree that combines languages with a business skill, say marketing or business, or with something more practical such as engineering, then you would be in this situation. As a language graduate who combined with Philosophy, a fantastic degree for developing thinking skills, I found that if I wanted to use my Italian then I was only really qualified for foreign-language telesales, sales or as a secretary. On their own, language skills are not enough, and need to be thought of as a tool rather than an end in themselves.

The majority of my friends have forsaken their language skills for other areas, including politics, social work and law. They do not get to use their languages very often, and as a result their level has gone down. Although I have a job in which I am lucky enough to use my languages on a daily basis, and gain exposure to other languages, I am on a salary that is much lower than most of my peers.

I think that students should be taught that languages are a tool that can enable you to travel, meet new people, grow in many ways and learn a lot, but that they cannot be studied in isolation. I think that Erasmus students should be encouraged to study something practical or relevant to the modern working world, rather than to follow endless Art History and Dialectology classes as I did. Fascinating, but none of these subjects helped me in my working life. I was always impressed by the Spanish and French students who studied abroad to gain more knowledge in certain fields and pciked up the language as they went along.

You can see the new item on the bbc here;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8244716.stm