In the sentence “In today’s increasingly interconnected world, speaking multiple lan...

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