English in education

While the teaching of English in continental Europe can be traced back to the 16th century, it remained restricted until the 19th century mainly to places that traded with Great Britain, and was more common outside school in professional circles (van Essen, 1997). True competition with French and German in secondary education started in the 1880s. In certain parts of Germany the teaching of English began to take preference over that of French from the 1920s onwards.

Until the Second World War, English was still little taught in central and Eastern Europe, where German and French were firmly established. After the war differences in trends developed between Western Europe and what were then called the East European countries.

In Western Europe English supplanted German and French from the 1950s onwards as the first foreign language taught in the Scandinavian countries and from the 1960s in the Netherlands. It was also during this period that the teaching of English in France started clearly to outstrip that of German. The swing from French to English occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Spain, and a little later in Portugal and Italy. In eastern Europe the teaching of Russian became compulsory after the Second World War and remained so until the end of the 1980s.

At the end of the Stalinist period English was re-introduced alongside German, which as the language of the German Democratic Republic was still taught, particularly in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia, and alongside French, which was still taught in Romania and Bulgaria. Its importance grew progressively until the end of the 1980s (Fodor and Peluau, 2001).

In Eastern Europe the requirement that Russian be taught was abandoned in the 1990s and languages were allowed to compete. This greatly benefited English, which began to be taught much more widely. Nevertheless, in countries like Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic it is in competition with German. In Romania English and French are both widely taught, the strong presence maintained by the latter being due to its recognised social and historical status (Truchot, 2001). Almost everywhere, English has become the first modern language taught, and the proportions of pupils learning it are fast approaching those found in the European Union.