In Praise of Languages for Internationalization

The following is a guest post by Elspeth Jones, professor emerita of the internationalization of higher education at Leeds Metropolitan University, in Britain, and an international-education consultant.
Last month, The New York Times published a provocative essay by Larry H. Summers which argued, amongst other things, that American college students don’t necessarily need to learn a second language. The spread of English globally, the fragmentation of other languages, and the improvement in translation technology, he writes, “make it less clear that the substantial investment necessary to speak a foreign tongue is universally worthwhile.” I couldn’t disagree more.
Prompt responses from Nafsa: The Association of International Educators and others presented alternative viewpoints, but it is difficult to get across to those who speak only one language how greatly life is enriched through competence in another. There are many important reasons to study languages (the Centre for Languages, Linguistics, and Area Studies in the United Kingdom offers 700 of them) and those of us interested in the internationalization of higher education have special reason to argue the cause. More...