State of the art and policy implications

Université Libre de Bruxelles
Marriott Hotel, Brussels
22 September 2006

Dear Rectors,
Ladies and gentlemen,
Let me first of all warmly thank the organisers of this event, which gives me
the welcome opportunity of addressing the complex issue of multilingualism
from what is, for me, a new and different angle.

I am sure that we share the view that multilingualism is not a problem, but a
richness. Professor Van De Craen, in his introductory remarks, quoted my
webpage in Dutch; if you had checked last year, you would have found
virtually no Commissioners’ websites in your mother tongue. Now they are
all multilingual, some even in 20 or 21 languages. This shows that an
enlarged Europe is more European and more complete. This is also why now
multilingualism is a policy, not just a technical matter.

When I first received the invitation to participate in this conference, it
reminded me of a book, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

At the beginning of the novel, before he is sent off to his mission in the
Congo, the British captain Charles Marlow is examined by a Belgian doctor.
While measuring him back and front and every way and taking notes, the
physician explains that he always measures, in the interest of science, the
skulls of people leaving for Africa. Marlow takes him for a harmless fool
and asks whether the same procedure applies when those adventurous people
come back. ‘Oh, I never see them,’ answers the doctor; ‘and, moreover, the
changes take place inside, you know.’

Well, it would seem that – one century after the publication of Conrad’s
masterpiece – the same tradition of scientific enquiry is still flourishing in
Brussels, and that research has finally moved into the mysteries of what
happens inside the head.

As you can imagine, I am often invited to talk about the importance of
languages in the European Union, a fact which confirms that multilingualism
is now high on the European political agenda. Language policy, as anybody
living in Belgium knows, is an extremely sensitive issue, about which
almost everybody seems to have a very firm opinion; at the same time, it is
surprising how the entire debate is based on very little scientific evidence
and is often driven by emotional, rather than rational, considerations.

There are no reliable data, for instance, on the language skills of European
citizens. For sure, we have fairly detailed data on the input, such as the
number of hours spent in classrooms trying to learn a foreign language. We
have data based on self-assessment, such as those collected through our
Eurobarometer studies, telling us how well people think that they can speak
and understand a foreign language. But we do not know how well those
languages taught at school are actually learned.

This is why in 2002 the European Council launched a great effort to develop
a European indicator of language competence, which will allow us to judge
and adjust the performance of our school systems and to discover how
efficiently the taxpayers’ money is spent in language education. We are now
setting up the Advisory Board which will help us develop the indicator and
we hope that by 2008 we will have the first objective data.

Through the Socrates and Leonardo programmes, the European
Commission invests over € 30 million per year in practical projects that
stimulate the enthusiasm of language learners and their teachers, not to
mention the enormous investment in mobility through Erasmus, the Youth
programme, and town-twinning activities. All these activities will continue
to be promoted under the new Lifelong Learning programme. Moreover, in
the Action Plan on “Promoting Language Learning and Linguistic
Diversity”, the Commission committed itself to undertaking 45 actions at
European level between 2004 and 2006. Thirdly, in November last year, the
Commission published a Communication on “A new framework strategy for
multilingualism”. The strategy sets out the way forward and proposes new
actions to be undertaken by both the Commission and Member States. An
interministerial conference that I will organise in 2007 will help us take
stock of progress made both at national and European level.

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Parents and educators need scientific guidance concerning which languages
children should learn at home and at school; in an increasingly
heterogeneous society, with growing mobility and linguistically complex
situations, people expect specialist assistance concerning the languages they
should use with their children, the schools where they should go and the
foreign languages they should study. This concerns not only migrants, but
also mixed couples as well as people living in areas where regional and
minority languages are spoken. Let’s not forget that Europe has around 80
indigenous languages.

We want to move the debate on languages out of the quicksands of
ideological stances and transform it into an informed exchange of opinions
on the advantages and disadvantages of different linguistic choices, of
different language policies.
Language teaching, as you very well know, is many things: it certainly is an
art and a craft – and a difficult one at that – but it is also a profession that
can and should be based on the most recent advances of cognitive and
medical sciences.

Neuro-imaging techniques, and more generally all research on the complex
and fascinating issue of brain-functioning related to languages, can prove
extremely valuable from many points of view. Of course, they can help
people suffering from aphasia, dyslexia and other communication
difficulties, but they can go much further. In helping us understand the
dynamics of language, they can contribute among other things to creating a
scientific platform for the teaching and learning of languages.

The European Commission recently published a study on the teaching of
languages to learners with special needs. One of the most interesting
conclusions, in my view, was that solutions adopted for people with special
education needs, such as the Individual Education Plan, were equally good
for other pupils, given the wide range of strategies and the various forms of
intelligence that come into play when learning languages.

What we expect from research in this field, then, is guidance in developing
better approaches to language acquisition, approaches that are more effective
and more gratifying for the learners and for all those involved. Today’s
conference is an important step in this direction, breaking the traditional
barriers between “humanities” and “hard sciences”.

Science and technology should not be regarded with suspicion by members
of the language teaching profession, as they can make their efforts much
more rewarding.

Comparative anatomy has explained the relative advantage of humans
compared to other species when it comes to communication. The lower
position of the larynx in the throat, apparently, could be one of the keys to
the development of language in the homo sapiens sapiens and ultimately to
his extraordinary success, social organisation and bold spread all over the
Earth. Genetics is another science which has produced interesting results for
historical linguistics. Research on the relationship between human genes and
languages has helped to chart the migrations of our ancestors around the
planet tens of thousands of years ago as well as to better define the complex
genealogical tree of human language.

A better understanding of neural areas involved in speech production and
reception can prove useful in several ways: I am told, for instance, that
learning a new language can have collateral benefits not only for young
people, where early stimulation would result in changes in the structure of
the brain, but also for older people suffering from various mental
impairments, such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Developments made possible by advances in clinical studies on the brain can
also produce remarkable benefits for research on language teaching and
learning.

As you probably know, the European Commission supports the European
Brain Council, the umbrella organisation for brain research in Europe,
associating neurologists, psychiatrists, basic neuroscientists, patients and the
relevant industry.

In the 6th Framework Programme for Research and Technological
Development, brain research has been funded mainly through the area called
“Studying the brain and combating diseases of the nervous system”, with
€ 157 Million for about 50 projects. If we take into account projects related
to brain research funded in other areas as well, total funding reaches about
€ 250 Million. Projects funded encompass the whole range of brain research,
from basic mechanisms of brain function (e.g. memory and learning,
synaptic plasticity) to neurological and psychiatric diseases (e.g.
Alzheimer’s, rare neurological diseases, depression, addiction, schizophrenia
and autism).

The research programmes of the European Union have funded three main
types of projects in this area:

Research projects on the basic principles of language acquisition, in
particular in early infancy
. Through multidisciplinary studies, including
neuro-imaging, researchers are trying to decipher the process of language
development and acquisition.

Research projects linked to language development disorders
. Projects on the
possible origins of dyslexia, also involving neuro-imaging, were funded
under the 5th and 6th Framework Programmes.

Conferences and workshops about language acquisition and disorders
.

In the 7th Framework Programme brain research will once again play an
important part: the sub-theme on “Translational research for human health”
of the “Collaborative research” section, for instance, includes the area called
“Research on the brain and related diseases, human development and aging.”
The Specific Programme for brain research is rather broad, allowing a large
variety of topics to be taken into account.

Other activities related to brain research are being supported outside the
Framework Programme. The European Science Foundation, for instance, is
currently funding an important network on “Multilingual multidisciplinary
studies on brain and language,” which started in 2003 and will terminate at
the end of 2006. This network, which has an important neuro-imaging
component, brings together most of the best European specialists in this
area.

The Commission is well aware, therefore, of the important contribution that
scientific research can make to its policies in favour of multilingualism. It
would be wrong, however, to see languages as the problem and science and
technology as the solution. Plurilingualism in Europe – as with bilingualism
in Brussels – is a necessity, but at the same time it is the key to new
opportunities. True mobility entails multilingualism; we need
multilingualism if we want European citizens, not just tourists.

Almost every day, the Commission services answer letters from people who
have found the solution to the apparent conflict between a multilingual
Europe and too many monolingual Europeans: along with those who suggest
English, Latin or Esperanto as a lingua franca for the Union, there are others
who look for the ideal solution in technology. Machine translation – now
based on statistical methods and combined with speech synthesis and voice
recognition, or with the creation of gigantic corpora, lexicons and
dictionaries – is generally proposed as the answer to all our problems.

I would like here to give you some examples of the importance of
multilingualism taken from my visit to the US, earlier this year, which will
help tripling academic cooperation between Europe and the United States,
with whom we always tend to compare ourselves: Georgetown university,
where I gave a speech, wants to increase language teaching, and the
President himself came out in February with a new strategy for languages.
But the diversity of languages is not Babel’s curse; it is also our richness,
and we are determined to preserve it. Actually the “Babel effect” can exist in
the same family, region, nation or among communities, and it depends on
the lack of communication, not on the diversity of languages. Europe should
be a synonymous of openness: open heart, open mind, empathy and
sympathy. In this context, we are persuaded that plurilingual citizens are
better able to deal with today’s complex reality, because multilingualism
entails a multiplicity of perspectives and an openness to other cultures that
would be unattainable through the use of any vehicular language or of any
technological device, however useful these can be for facilitating the task of
translation between different languages.

In Conrad’s novel, Captain Marlow explained that, from his childhood, he
had always been fascinated by the white patches and blank spaces – terra
incognita, terra nullis – that still could be found on the maps of the
continents. Today we have extremely detailed maps of the remotest corners
of the world, but our brain remains a largely uncharted territory, and the
production of language inside our brain remains one of the most fascinating
continents to be discovered.

This is why we will follow with great interest today’s conference and further
developments in neuro-linguistics, in the hope that they will help us all to
become more multilingual, more flexible, more European.

I would like to conclude by telling you that on 3 October, I will chair the
first official meeting of the High Level Group on Multiligualism, where we
will deal with research and multilingualism (other topics, such as the media,
business, strategies for language learning, etc.) will follow. We believe that
it is important to pull together different types of knowledge, because we
need integration and participation, not assimilation.

Diverse in unity is the best narrative for Europe in the 21st century. Diversity
is growing, that’s why we need to address unity, through common values:
understanding, respect for human dignity, no discrimination. Your work can
contribute to this aim.