Nearly
1.5bn people More Chinese
worldwide children learn
speak English English than
there are people
in Britain
WORLD CLASS:
Teaching our native tongue hen the French government
contributes £1.3bn to the
UK economy. Yet we are
losing out to our foreign
rivals, discovers IAN WYLIE
W reluctantly decreed that Eng-
lish lessons be made compul-
sory in schools, Paris daily Le
Monde ran a cartoon of two chil-
dren talking in the playground. ‘If they force us
to learn English, we’ll speak only French,’ one
says in French. ‘Yeah,’ replies his friend.
When even the French admit defeat, the tri-
umph of English as the world’s lingua franca is
assured. Now spoken by close to 1.5 billion
people, our language is our most successful ex-
port. Whether you’re a Swedish executive on
business in Shanghai or a Brazilian geneticist
at a conference in Mexico, you’re probably
speaking English.
English language training is one of the mo-
tors of globalisation and a multi-billion-dollar
industry. But who is profiting from this English
explosion? The British? The Americans? Not
any more, says a report published this month:
native-speaking nations – Britain, the US, Can-
ada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa –
have squandered their competitive edge.
According to the UN, more people now
speak English as a second language than speak
it as a first. And they’re the ones teaching it,
too. Research for the European Commission
shows that the proportion of adults in the EU
who speak English has risen to nearly half,
56 mt February 2006
while the number of people speaking German
or French has fallen. Even in Brussels, 60% of
Commission memos are in English, 25% in
French and just 5% in German. Since the fall of
the Berlin Wall, English has also become the
language of choice for military operations, as
former Warsaw Pact countries join Nato
troops on manoeuvres.
English is the official language of the Euro-
pean Central Bank and the working language
of Asian trade bloc ASEAN. In India, where a
good command of English can mean a ticket to
a prized call-centre job, there are more English
speakers than the total populations of the UK,
US, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
Half the world will be speaking or learning
English by 2015, says the British Council, the
Foreign Office body that promotes British cul-
ture abroad. There are more Chinese children
studying English than there are people in the
British Isles. You cannot graduate from a Chi-
nese university without passing a basic English
exam, and even Beijing’s taxi drivers have been
ordered to learn English before the 2008
Olympics or risk losing their licences.
In central Asia, the president of Turkmeni-
stan recently ordered his entire cabinet to learn
English, so that they can conduct trade talks
and international negotiations on an equal
footing. The capricious Saparmurat Niyazov
 Nearly half
the adult
population of
Europe speak
English
English is a global business
Turkmenbashi (whose previous diktats include
bans on recorded music and men with long
hair) has given his ministers six months to dis-
pense with their interpreters or face the chop.
Why English? The reasons for the rise of
our language to global domination are many:
from colonial expansion and economic globali-
sation to satellite TV and the internet. There
have been heroes and villains along the way:
John Wycliffe and William Tyndale, who
penned and printed the first English transla-
tions of the Bible; the Plymouth Pilgrims, who
carried English with them to America; slave
traders, spice merchants and explorers who in-
troduced the language to Africa, India and
Australia; and the US marketeers who through
their Coca-Cola colonialism came to dominate
much of the 20th-century world with their
brand of American English.
Teaching English as a foreign language –
TEFL – is one of the oldest commercialised
education sectors. Private language schools
were pioneered by teachers such as Maximilian
Berlitz, who established a school in Rhode Is-
land in 1878, before setting up 16 more in
Europe. Former Berlitz teacher Alfred Larke
opened one of the earliest UK schools, the
London School of English, in 1912 in premises
opposite Berlitz in Oxford Street, London.
Oxford Street remains a language school bat-
Half the
world will
speak
English by
2015
tlefield. Ads, flyers and billboards promise in-
stant access to the language of success.
There are 1,400 language schools in the UK,
most attracting overseas students to their Eng-
lish courses via an established network of
‘language travel agents’. At a cost of between
£350 and £1,500 a week per student, English
language teaching contributes £1.3 billion a
year to the UK economy, according to the
British Council, which accredits course
providers. Language Travel Magazine estimates
that the total TEFL market in native English-
speaking countries is worth about £4.5 billion.
The British Council, set up 70 years ago to
combat Nazi propaganda, is an important
English teacher itself. Through state-sector
teachers and local authorities, it teaches Eng-
lish to 300,000 learners in 56 countries, and
much of its £485 million a year income derives
from language services.
But compared with the insatiable appetite
globally for English teaching, the UK market is
a cottage industry. It’s reckoned that only 50 of
these 1,400 language schools have sales exceed-
ing £1 million. Many are still owned and run by
the teachers who established them. With a
number of smaller schools approaching their
40th or 50th anniversaries, some are being
passed on to heirs or sold to British-owned lan-
guage chains, such as OISE (see profile, p58)
and the Daily Mail ’s Brighton-based Study
Group. But the largest language-school chains
operate from countries where the first lan-
guage is not English: chains such as Euro-
centres, owned by Swiss retail giant Migros,
Japanese-owned Geos and Sweden’s EF.
As David Graddol argues in a report for the
British Council to be published on February
14, the world’s love of English is pushing us to a
tipping point beyond which the economic ad-
vantage of native speakers will vanish forever.
Graddol, an Open University academic and
an authority on English language trends, says
economics are now working against us. ‘The
costs of studying English in native-speaking
countries are very high and yet the majority of
the learners live in low-cost nations. To be sus-
tainable, it ought to be the other way round.’
The biggest boom of recent years has been
in Chinese students, yet the number travelling
to the UK and the US to learn English has col-
lapsed, due in part to tough immigration
measures and a weak dollar.
While being a native English speaker was
once the gold standard, Graddol says native
speakers will find themselves marginalised and
less influential as speaking English becomes a
generic learning skill, more akin to learning a
computer language. Increasingly, learners are
less interested in the culture of the English-
February 2006 mt 57
 English is now
more widely
spoken as a
second language
than as a first
speaking nations than how the language can
give their career plans a boost.
Graddol recalls visiting a Chinese university
that chose a Belgian company to develop Eng-
lish lessons for it. When he asked why, they
explained they saw it as an advantage that the
Belgians, like the Chinese, are not native
speakers and so would have a feel both for the
intricacies of learning the language in adult-
hood and for using it to communicate with
other non-native speakers.
As a result, traditional English language
learning destinations are facing strong compe-
tition from countries where English is the
official second language. ‘Chinese students are
choosing closer regional options such as Singa-
pore and India, or even European options such
as Holland and Switzerland, where lectures are
taught in English,’ explains Graddol.
Even the core of the English language school
market – teenage students from continental
Europe – is under threat. ‘The old-fashioned
language school method was to teach English
to groups of teenagers coming over from Eu-
rope,’ explains Graddol. ‘But that market is
declining fast because many countries are now
teaching English as early as six years old. It is
affecting the language schools profoundly.’
Attempts by some of the language chains to
establish schools in Asian markets such as
China have met with little success. ‘Some of the
big-name chains are struggling to make money
in China,’ says Graddol. ‘The people making
most of the money are local providers operat-
ing at lower costs. The quality of teaching may
not be as high, but most students just want to
get through an exam.’
Other British educational institutions seem
58 mt February 2006
It is impossible
to graduate from a
Chinese university
without passing
a basic English
exam
THE MAN WHO STAYED THE COURSE
Till Gins, chief executive, OISE
L
ike many British language schools,
Oxford Intensive School of English
(OISE) is still owned and run by the
man who established it more than 30
years ago. On the way, Till Gins
developed the management skills to
build his company into the largest chain
of language schools in the UK.
OISE owns and runs 22
permanent and 22 summer
schools in cities around
the world, including
London, Bristol,
Cambridge, Boston,
San Francisco,
Sydney, Madrid,
Heidelberg and Paris.
After acquiring rivals
that include Basil Paterson
College, Harven School of
English, Newbury Hall, Pilgrims and,
most recently, Regent, OISE teaches
more than 13,000 students and has an
annual turnover of more than £30m.
‘It would be wrong to think Britain
has always had a monopoly in the
English teaching industry,’ says Gins.
‘Thirty years ago the Swedes were
pioneering what they called international
English, so the British have never had a
strong hold on this industry.’
According to Gins, only a dozen or so
of his competitors have a turnover of
more than £5m. ‘Many schools were
begun by English teachers for whom it
was a lifestyle business. Few had the
skills to build it into a real business.
Now they’re realising that the business
environment is very different to what it
was when they started.
‘Our recipe for success has been to
grow gradually, and I’ve tried to develop
managers and management
rigour as we’ve gone along.
It’s difficult in any
people-based service
industry to get
economies of scale,
but we keep a tight
lid on our costs and
run everything from a
small corporate base.’
Gins plans to list OISE
on the Alternative Investment
Market (AIM) later this year. He’ll
continue to concentrate on attracting
students who want to travel to the
countries where the language is spoken.
‘Most of our students are from
continental Europe, and for us that
market is still very healthy – the
economies of Europe are strong as far
as we’re concerned.
‘But it’s true that people don’t come
to Britain to learn “British English” any
more. They’re more practical than that:
they want to function in a world that
happens to communicate in English.’
 The English-speaking
population of India is larger
than the combined population
of Britain, America,
Australia, New Zealand
and South Africa
TEXTING ADVICE FOR STUDENTS
Graham Hacker, chief executive, Infospeed Software
G
raham Hacker knows that language
students, like any other kind of
students, can be a pretty disorganised
bunch. Which is why his firm writes
software that keeps tabs on language
students by SMS.
‘When students get off a plane,
what’s the first thing they do?’ asks
Hacker. ‘They switch on their
phones. So we thought it
would be nice for the
phone to bleep with a
text that says:
“Welcome to ABC
language school”.
‘But it also means
that if they lose all
their documentation and
their notes – as many of
them do – they have a
telephone number as an emergency
contact should they find themselves up
a gum tree,’ he adds.
The SMS function, which also sends
out friendly text messages asking
truant students to get in touch with the
school office, is just a small part of
Infospeed’s Class program – an
industry-specific piece of ‘visual basic’
software that has already captured
more than a third of the UK language
school market.
‘We’re just a small company of 14
people, but because four of us are from
the language school business, we
decided to write a booking and
administration system for the language
industry because it’s quirky,’ says
Hacker, who was previously financial
controller for the Aspect language
school chain. ‘It’s a complex business
with bits of travel, bits of language
training and bits of
accommodation.’
Having signed up
large global chains and
franchises, including
Eurocentres, Aspect,
International House
and Language
Studies International,
Infospeed software has
been installed in Australia,
New Zealand, the US, Canada,
Europe and the Middle East. This year,
the company plans to offer an internet-
based version of the software to the
agents who recruit students on behalf
of language schools.
‘What we’re now finding is that
English is the key language in all
international schools, regardless of
what they teach,’ says Hacker.
‘Even a Spanish school teaching
Spanish internationally will now use
English to communicate, because the
rest of the world wants to communicate
in English.’
to be faring better. Harrow and Shrewsbury
colleges have offshoots in Bangkok. Notting-
ham University has a campus in Malaysia, and
last year opened the first foreign university
campus in China, at Ningbo. Cambridge Uni-
versity, meanwhile, is overseeing Beijing’s
English-language teaching programmes in
preparation for the 2008 Olympic Games.
The changing commercial landscape has
some TEFL players exploring different busi-
ness models, positioning themselves to offer
support services for English language teaching.
The Study Group, for example, has signed a
deal with the University of Sussex to prepare
overseas students for degree courses. Macmil-
lan, one of the biggest publishers of English
language textbooks, has invested £4 million in
its English campus, an online teaching re-
source for language teachers. Other firms, such
as Infospeed (see profile, left), are pioneering
software for student administration.
But native speakers shouldn’t assume they
need learn only their own language. Research
by CILT, the national centre for languages,
shows that where English is the language of our
customers – the US, Australia, the Republic of
Ireland and India – the value of our exports ex-
ceeds the amount we import. However, major
trading partners whose first language is not
English (Germany, France, the Netherlands,
Belgium, Spain and Italy) all manage to sell us
more than we sell them.
At present, only one in three Britons can
speak a second language, yet language lessons
are no longer compulsory after the age of 14.
English may be our greatest export, but if we
remain language dunces we’ll be the greatest
victims of our own success. mt
February 2006 mt 59