Learning foreign languages is an important part of secondary education in Europe. One could argue that it should be enough to just learn English (which is the language most Europeans resort to when communicating with someone from another country), but this couldn’t be further from the truth. [...]
The following map shows the average number of languages learned per pupil in lower secondary education (based on data by Eurostat from 2013). This phase of secondary education usually lasts around 4 years and is compulsory. Note that the average is calculated with respect to all students in lower secondary education, so, for example, if students in a certain country learned 1 language in the first 2 years and 2 languages in the following two years of lower secondary education, the average would be 1.5. [...]
Many of the figures change quite drastically after the transition to general upper secondary education (excluding vocational schools), which is usually not compulsory, as the map below shows: [...]
There are some surprising differences between the two maps. The figures tend to be relatively similar in most cases, but there is a significant drop in the case of Italy and Portugal and a large increase in the case of Belgium. The situation in Portugal is especially worrying, as it is the only non-English-speaking EU country where less than 1 foreign language per pupil is studied at this level.
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