User:Lulumethyl/Grin Report

The report Language teaching as public policy or Grin report (pronounced /gʁɛ̃/, like grain in French) is a document written in 2005 by François Grin, as a professor of Economics at the University of Geneva, at the request of the French Haut Conseil à l'évaluation de l'école.

This document tries to answer the following questions: "which foreign languages to teach, for which reasons, and considering which context?"

This report discusses sound language policies from the point of view of economic cost, as well as political and cultural implications. In particular, it studies three scenarios of language policy at the level of the European Union: the choice of a single natural language, the choice of a trio of natural languages and the choice of a constructed language, Esperanto.

This report is known at the European level and was the subject of a written question to the European Parliament. However, it was not followed by any change in practice in any state's language policy.

First scenario: everything in English
The report analyzes the choice of the English language, although its analysis can be applied to any other national language that is chosen as the sole language.

The author of the report indicates that, for the United Kingdom, one of the member states where English is an official language, this represents a saving of seventeen to eighteen billion euros per year (i.e. €290 per capita; and in sum more than triple the UK rebate). This saving would be reinforced if English were chosen as the sole language. This figure does not take into account the additional benefits enjoyed by native speakers of the single chosen language, in a situation of conflict or negotiation taking place in that language; moreover, the report indicates that the symbolic effects also have material and financial repercussions.

According to the Grin Report, the five points giving rise to unfair redistribution are:


 * 1) a near-monopoly position in the markets for translation and interpretation into English, writing texts in English, production of teaching materials for teaching English and teaching that language. 700,000 people visit the UK every year just to learn English, spending an estimated total of £1,000 per person there;
 * 2) saving time and money in international communication; non-native speakers making every effort to speak English and accepting messages in that language;
 * 3) the saving of time and money for English speakers, thanks to the fact that they no longer need to learn other languages;
 * 4) the return on investment, in other forms of human capital, of resources that English speakers no longer need to invest in foreign language learning;
 * 5) the dominant position of English speakers in any situation of negotiation, competition or conflict taking place in English.

Second scenario: plurilingualism
The trilingual scenario consists of asking each European citizen to know two languages among, for example, French, German and English.

According to the author of the report, this scenario does not change the costs of teaching languages. Plurilingualism is not a perfectly egalitarian scenario: even if we accept that all Europeans learn two foreign languages, we can distinguish two situations:


 * for persons whose mother tongue is English, French or German, it suffices that one of the two foreign languages is drawn from this group of three languages, but the other foreign language can perfectly well be a third language, whether it is Italian, Japanese or Welsh;
 * on the other hand, for a resident whose mother tongue is Estonian or Portuguese, the two foreign languages must come from the English-French-German troika. Any other language (again, whether Italian, Japanese or Welsh) would necessarily have to be learned as a third foreign language.

This restriction does not ensure intercomprehension (a necessary condition for one to be able to affirm that multilingualism guarantees the same communicational benefits as "all-English" or Esperanto ). Indeed, if the plurilingualism in question here is to really stand out from linguistic hegemony, this presupposes that the member states will have set up real measures to encourage the use of several languages.

If these measures are ineffective, we fall back into the “all-English” scenario; but if they are effective, one can, almost by definition, expect that European citizens whose mother tongue is neither English nor French nor German will learn two of these languages in a significantly equal way.

Eventually, Europeans (apart from those whose mother tongue is English, French or German) will be divided into three large groups: those whose linguistic repertoire includes, as foreign languages, English and French, French and German, or English and German. Grin calculates that French-speakers, English-speakers and German-speakers learn each other's languages in such a way as to tend, roughly speaking, towards the same distribution of skills in three thirds.

The probability that, faced with an audience of 20 people, the use of one of the languages of the troika excludes one of these people is 99.9%, even thought this person has a repertoire conforming to the model of the privileged troika. It is almost certain that at least one participant has a repertoire which, while perfectly conforming to the model of the privileged troika, does not include the language chosen for this meeting of twenty people.

In addition, one of the underlying problems is the choice of languages to be part of the troika (and on what criteria to choose them), once this choice has been made and posed, there is the problem of the stability of the troika towards the countries entering the Union (Imagine that Russia or Arab countries enter the Union, it is politically difficult to imagine that their languages do not in turn become official).

Third scenario: Esperanto
The author of the report indicates that the use of Esperanto as a vehicular language would lead to a net annual saving of twenty-five billion euros for the European Union (i.e. more than 54 € per inhabitant).

One might think, at first glance, that it is only a question of replacing English with Esperanto, and that it is an "all-Esperanto" rather than an “all-English” scenario. Despite this surface resemblance, the differences between the two linguistic environments are significant.


 * First, the use of Esperanto suddenly eliminates all the inequitable transfers to which “all-English” gives rise; this also applies to the “legitimation effect” or “rhetorical effect” (effects which are not quantified in the study); the symbolic importance of this effect, however, remains major.
 * Second, learning Esperanto is considerably faster than learning any natural language, and to varying degrees this superiority manifests itself regardless of the learner's native language. It is perhaps more obvious for people whose mother tongue is a Latin language, but it also exists for those whose mother tongue is Germanic or Slavic, or even non-Indo-European, despite a vocabulary of essentially Indo-European origin,.
 * Third, since Esperanto is no one's language and therefore easily everyone's language (citation), its spread is less threatening to the current languages of Europe than is the spread of English.

Comparison
The comparison between the different scenarios is based on the following elements:


 * 1) the definition of a linguistic environment, with reference to the European context
 * 2) identification of the benefits, in particular communication, associated with each environment
 * 3) a very brief definition of the main lines of foreign-language teaching policy that each environment requires
 * 4) the costs to the education system associated with these education policies
 * 5) the transfers caused by each linguistic environment, distinguishing, in accordance with the analysis of the previous chapter:
 * 6) privileged markets
 * 7) economy of effort in communication
 * 8) economy of effort in the teaching of foreign languages
 * 9) the returns on the savings made on this teaching.

Scenarios 1 and 2 therefore have the same cost in terms of foreign language teaching. Scenario 3, on the other hand, has a lower cost, since reaching a certain level of proficiency in Esperanto is much faster than for any other language: Grin opted for the greatest caution in admitting a ratio of one to three (instead of the ratio 1 to 10) in favor of Esperanto. Other scattered estimates in the literature confirm the faster achievement of target language skills in Esperanto than in all the other languages with which the comparison was made as well as the propaedeutic advantages of the language.

The adoption of Esperanto could save France more than 5.4 billion euros. In addition, the choice of the scenario entirely in English would lead to transfers of money to English-speaking countries, of the order of 10 million euros. The amounts evaluated here relate to a calendar year; they add up from year to year, and reinforce a dynamic that is increasingly difficult to reverse, and in which these amounts themselves will weigh more and more heavily. On a European scale, this could be 25 billion euros saved,.

Taking equity into account in the ranking of scenarios should therefore lead to retaining scenario 2 or 3. Taking into account non-market values would lead to strengthening the appeal of scenario 2, because it promotes visibility of the diversity of languages and cultures; on the other hand, it would show the defects of scenario 1, because it is the one that runs the greatest risks of uniformity.

Scenario 1 ("all-English") presents serious risks of standardization and cannot prevent the marginalization of the other languages of Europe. Scenario 2 (“multilingualism”) is supported in the general principles of European official discourse, although in a vague way. However, this discourse does not seem to have any effect in practice. For scenario 2 to be credible, it must incorporates measures that regulate communication contexts. The necessary measures of scenario 2 can be perceived as artificial and restrictive.

Conclusion of the report
François Grin concludes that the best strategy among those studied over the long term for language teaching as a public policy is to favor Esperanto (scenario 3). It does not explore other possibilities of constructed language.