Languages make business sense, says new director

Citation

(2005), "Languages make business sense, says new director", Education + Training, Vol. 47 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/et.2005.00447aab.005

Languages make business sense, says new director

Language skills are an integral part of efforts to build an entrepreneurial society in which businesses and individuals thrive and achieve their potential, says the new director of the National Centre for Languages (Cilt). In a statement to mark the European Day of Languages, Isabella Moore said: “Language skills can improve the overall productivity of small firms and develop more enterprise in disadvantaged communities. Linguistic diversity is a precious resource – good for business and good for encouraging intercultural understanding and positive attitudes towards difference. The challenge this country faces is to encourage individuals and employers not only to improve their language skills but also to do so on a scale that our economy needs.”

Isabella Moore announced an increase in the support Cilt offers regionally through the Comenius network. “Comenius managers in each English region, working with Cilt, will be developing support for language teachers in line with the Government’s national languages strategy”, she said. “One of their key objectives is to bring more teachers into contact with training and continuous professional development…At the same time, schools and colleges must play their part in giving a higher priority to the training of their languages staff. The demands of teaching a language and motivating students to learn are very different from the demands of teaching other subjects, and training managers in schools and colleges should recognise this.”