[EDLING:523] English teaching industry set for boom

[Tamara Warhol]

English teaching industry set for boom
Press Association
Thursday December 9, 2004

English learning is set to rocket with half the world's population speaking the
language by 2015, new research revealed today.

Two billion people will start learning English within the next 10 years and
three billion will speak it, a study for the British Council estimated.

But by 2050 the boom will be over and the English language teaching industry
will have become a victim of its own success, David Graddol's report The Future
of English said.

Mr Graddol's research, based on a new computer model, is revealed today at the
council's Going Global conference on international education in Edinburgh.

The lecturer, who has worked in education and language studies at the Open
University for the last 25 years, developed the model to estimate demand for
English language teaching.

It charted likely student numbers in classrooms through to 2050 by looking at
Unesco estimates on education provision, demographic projections, government
education policies and international student mobility figures.

The impact of educational innovations and other developments affecting the world
population were also factored in.

Based on its findings, Mr Graddol has predicted that the world is about to be
hit by a tidal wave of English.

Two billion people could be learning it by 2010/15, making a total of three
billion English speakers worldwide, he said.

But demand for teaching is sure to drop as children already study it when they
learn to read and write and more universities across the world choose to teach
in the language.

Mr Graddol predicts that the wave will soon smooth out and that the boom will be
over by 2050, leaving the £11bn English teaching industry high and dry.

English language students will be down from two billion to 500 million by 2050,
the researcher said.

The fact that more people can speak English is also not necessarily good news
for native speakers who cannot speak other languages as well.

It is only one of the languages people are learning and the world, far from
being dominated by English, is to become more multilingual.

Chinese, Arabic and Spanish are all popular and likely to be key languages in
the future, Mr Graddol said.

German is also apparently being used more as a foreign language, particularly in
parts of Asia.

French as an international language could be a major casualty of this wave of
"linguistic globalisation", he said.