The Englishization of European education: Concluding remarks

This conclusion returns to the main questions we put forward in the introduction: how do different stakeholders debate the Englishization that takes place across European education systems? By now, there is a reasonable body of literature on Englishization in Europe (see Macaro et al. 2018), and the rise of English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) at university level has been particularly well researched. So far, the dominant conceptualisation of Englishization in education has been–perhaps justifiably–one of a hierarchical, top-down process, with educational institutions and/or politicians and policy makers as instigators, and learners as receivers of the process. It has therefore been a useful exercise to consider the views of a wider group of stakeholders, and to ask what positive or negative stances towards the process they might hold.

Macaro et al.'s (2018) meta-study shows that, alongside the interest in Englishization in education, concerns over the phenomenon are also increasing. Empirical studies on the subject tend to report on the perceptions of immediate stakeholders involved in Englishization: primarily students and teachers, and sometimes institutional managers. The future of our national languages, however, is a concern to us all, and an ever-encroaching Englishization into new domains of life means that we all become stakeholders, from parents to end users of academic publications, to the general population. Some such views, hitherto neglected in the literature, are represented in this special issue in the form of public discourses on Englishization. Another important principle adopted here (see Lanvers and Hultgren 2018) which differs from many studies on the topic, was to allow the possibility that any stakeholder group may show a mix of negative and positive stances towards Englishization. Our international perspective also acts as exemplifier of the observation that who exactly might be in a top-down position i.e. able to decide on their language policy, depends on the policies and politics of the context. In German schools, for instance, many head teachers may have decision powers to implement EMI or Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL); in other countries, education policies are regulated more centrally. In Figure 1 below, we revisit the framework introduced in the Introduction, and add to it the arguments both for and against Englishization in education that we have encountered in our five articles. The following discussion considers how each of our contributions relates to this model.

In addition to exploring different stakeholders' attitudes to Englishization, another question to be asked is if there are national differences in attitudes towards Englishization. It is known that, in terms of EMI in higher education, the Nordic countries have progressed furthest, followed by Germany, then Spain and France–although all countries show upwards trends (Hultgren et al. 2015; Macaro et al. 2018; Wächter and Maiworm 2014). How does this relate to the discourses on Englishization in these countries, as reported in this special issue? On the one hand, we might predict that, as has been observed elsewhere, that those countries whose national language is rarely learned by others tend to be keenest to adopt EMI (Coleman 2006; Vila and Bretxa 2014). Conversely, one might speculate that precisely the high use of English in education heightens stakeholders' concerns, e.g. over domain loss of national languages.

Figure 1.

Englishization in education: dimensions and arguments

Whilst the findings reported in this special issue do not map neatly onto these predictions, they show some trends nonetheless. We can take this as evidence of de Swaan's (2001) observation that second language learning usually has an upward direction in terms of language hierarchies, with learners acquiring languages of higher status than their first language (L1). In this respect, English, as the only 'hypercentral' language (de Swaan 2001) in our context, wins hands down every time. But what of the other languages of concern here? Staying with de Swaan's system of hierarchies, three languages are 'supercentral' (French, German, Spanish), and others are 'central' (Finnish, Icelandic, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Catalan). Might stakeholders representing central languages perceive English as a threat...