̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics

AI system may accelerate search for cancer discoveries

sc604 — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 12:09:25 +0000

̽��ֱ��system, called LION LBD and developed by computer scientists and cancer researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, has been designed to assist scientists in the search for cancer-related discoveries. It is the first literature-based discovery system aimed at supporting cancer research. ̽��ֱ��results are reported in the journal Bioinformatics.

Global cancer research attracts massive amounts of funding worldwide, and the scientific literature is now so huge that researchers are struggling to keep up with it: critical hypothesis-generating evidence is now often discovered long after it was published.

Cancer is a complex class of diseases that are not completely understood and are the second-leading cause of death worldwide. Cancer development involves changes in numerous chemical and biochemical molecules, reactions and pathways, and cancer research is being conducted across a wide variety of scientific fields, which have variability in the way that they describe similar concepts.

“As a cancer researcher, even if you knew what you were looking for, there are literally thousands of papers appearing every day,” said Professor Anna Korhonen, Co-Director of Cambridge’s Language Technology Lab who led the development of LION LBD in collaboration with Dr Masashi Narita at Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute and Professor Ulla Stenius at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. “LION LBD uses AI to help scientists keep up-to-date with published discoveries in their field, but could also help them make new discoveries by combining what is already known in the literature by making connections between sources that may appear to be unrelated.”

̽��ֱ��‘LBD’ in LION LBD stands for Literature-Based Discovery, a concept developed in the 1980s which seeks to make new discoveries by combing pieces of information from disconnected sources. ̽��ֱ��key idea behind the original version of LBD is that concepts that are never explicitly linked in the literature may be indirectly linked through intermediate concepts.

̽��ֱ��design of the LION LBD system allows real-time search to discover indirect associations between entities in a database of tens of millions of publications while preserving the ability of users to explore each mention in its original context.

“For example, you may know that a cancer drug affects the behaviour of a certain pathway, but with LION LBD, you may find that a drug developed for a totally different disease affects the same pathway,” said Korhonen.

LION LBD is the first system developed specifically for the needs of cancer research. It has a particular focus on the molecular biology of cancer and uses state-of-the-art machine learning and natural language processing techniques, in order to detect references to the hallmarks of cancer in the text. Evaluations of the system have demonstrated its ability to identify undiscovered links and to rank relevant concepts highly among potential connections.

̽��ֱ��system is built using open data, open source and open standards, and is available as an interactive web-based interface or a programmable API.

̽��ֱ��researchers are currently working on extending the scope of LION-LBD to include further concepts and relations. They are also working closely with cancer researchers to help and improve the technology for end users.

̽��ֱ��system was developed in collaboration with ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Language Technology Lab, Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, and Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, and was funded by the Medical Research Council.

Reference:
Sampo Pyysalo et al. ‘LION LBD: a Literature-Based Discovery System for Cancer Biology.’ Bioinformatics (2018). DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/bty845

Searching through the mountains of published cancer research could be made easier for scientists, thanks to a new AI system.

As a cancer researcher, even if you knew what you were looking for, there are literally thousands of papers appearing every day

Anna Korhonen

NIH Image Gallery

Skin cancer cells from a mouse show how cells attach at contact points

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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How could multilingualism benefit India’s poorest schoolchildren?

sjr81 — Tue, 20 Nov 2018 09:00:13 +0000

̽��ֱ��crowded and bustling streets of Delhi teem with life. Stop to listen and, above the din of rickshaws, taxis and buses, you’ll hear a multitude of languages, as more than 20 million men, women and children go about their daily lives.

Many were born and raised there, and many millions more have made India’s capital their home, having moved from surrounding neighbourhoods, cities and states or across the country, often in search of a better job, a better home and a better life.

Some arrive speaking fluent Hindi, the dominant language in Delhi (and the official language of government), but many arrive speaking any number of India’s 22 officially recognised languages, let alone the hundreds of regional and tribal languages in a country of more than 1.3 billion people.

Around 950 miles south of Delhi lies Hyderabad, where more than 70% of its seven million people speak Telugu. Meanwhile, in Bihar, in the northeast of India, Urdu has replaced Hindi as the dominant language across this poor and populous state of more than 100 million people.

What links Delhi, Hyderabad and Bihar is a four-year project, Multilingualism and multiliteracy: raising learning outcomes in challenging contexts in primary schools across India, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Department for International Development. Led by Professor Ianthi Tsimpli, from the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, the project involves Dr Dénes Szucs from the Department of Psychology, plus researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Reading and project partners in Karnataka, Hyderabad and New Delhi.

̽��ֱ��overriding aim of the project is to find out why in a country where multilingualism is so common (more than 255 million people in India speak at least two languages, and nearly 90 million speak three or more languages), the benefits and advantages of speaking more than one language, observed in Europe for instance, do not apply to many of India’s schoolchildren.

For Tsimpli, the answers to this conundrum may lie within the dataset she and her colleagues are compiling with the help of more than 1,000 primary-age schoolchildren across Delhi, Hyderabad and Bihar.

“Each year across India, 600,000 children are tested, and year after year more than half of children in Standard 5 [ten-year-olds] cannot read a Standard 2 [seven-year-olds] task fluently, and nearly half of them could not solve a Standard 2 subtraction task,” says Tsimpli, who co-leads Cambridge Language Sciences, the ̽��ֱ��’s Interdisciplinary Research Centre that brings together researchers from different fields to tackle ‘grand challenges’ where language is a factor.

“Low literacy and numeracy limit other important capabilities, including critical thinking and problem solving. Low educational achievement can lead to many dropping out of school – a problem disproportionately affecting female students. And the gap between state schools and private schools increases every year.”

She and colleagues are looking at whether these low learning outcomes could be a by-product of an Indian school system whereby the language that children are taught in often differs from the language used at home.

“We are looking at eight to 11-year-old schoolchildren in rural and urban areas,” she explains. “Within those urban areas we make the distinction between boys and girls living in slum and non-slum areas.

“Many children are internal migrants who move from remote, rural areas to urban areas. They are so poor they have to live in slums and, as a result of migration, these children may speak languages that are different to the regional language.

“By looking at the mismatch between home and school languages, and by using tests and other socio-economic and educational variables, we try to find out whether these children are advantaged or disadvantaged in literacy, numeracy, mathematical reasoning, problem solving and cognitive skills.”

Two years into the four-year project, the team has discovered considerable variation in the provision of education across government schools in the three areas, with different teaching practices and standards.

Having tested all 1,000 children, they will now embark on retesting them, looking not only at test results, but also allowing for other variables such as the standard of schooling, the environment and the teaching practices themselves. It’s possible that one of the causes of low performance is the lack of pupil-centred teaching methods; instead, the teacher dominates and there is little room for independent learning.

Although the findings are at a preliminary stage, Tsimpli and her team have found that the medium of instruction used in schools, especially English, may hold back those children who have little familiarity with, or exposure to,the language before starting school and outside of school life.

“Most of the evidence from this and other projects shows that English instruction in very disadvantaged areas might not be the best way to start, at least in the first three years [Standards 1 to 3] of primary,” says Tsimpli.

“What we would recommend for everyone, not just low socio-economic status children, would be to start learning in the language they feel comfortable learning in. ̽��ֱ��medium of instruction should reflect the strengths of the child. When it does, that child will learn better. English can still be used, but perhaps not as the medium of instruction in primary schools. It could, for example, be one of the subjects that are being taught alongside other subjects, starting perhaps from the third year of primary school.

“We are not suggesting that English be withdrawn – that ship has sailed – but we perhaps have to think more about learner needs. There is perhaps too much uniformity in teaching and less tailoring to the children’s language abilities and needs.”

While the preliminary results show that there is no difference in general intelligence among boys and girls from slum versus urban poor backgrounds, a surprising finding has been that children from slum backgrounds in Delhi do not seem to lag behind other children from other urban poor backgrounds – and in some cases perform better (e.g. in numeracy and literacy tasks).

This unexpected finding may be down to the life experiences of children growing up in slums, where they are likely to mature faster and come into closer contact with the numeracy skills essential for day-to-day survival.

Tsimpli adds that, despite the project only being at its midpoint, it has already caught the attention of government ministers, including Delhi’s Minister for Education, who is keen to use their findings to inform and adjust school policy in India’s capital city and the wider state.

“Delhi may be keen to adopt root-and-branch reform if our findings support it,” explains Tsimpli. “They are as keen as us to understand how the challenging context of deprivation can be attenuated when focusing on the languages children learn and use while at school.

“Our findings don’t mean that you’re doomed if you’re poor. It may be that these low learning outcomes are because of the way education is provided in India, with a huge focus on Hindi and English as the mediums of instruction, to the potential detriment of children unfamiliar with those languages.

“Language is central to the way knowledge is transferred – so the medium of instruction is obviously hugely influential. We hope to be able to show that problem solving, numeracy and literacy can and do improve in children who are educated in a language of instruction that they know. ̽��ֱ��trick may be to bridge school skills with life skills and make use of the richness of a child’s life experience to help them learn in the most effective ways possible.”

Inset image: credit Ianthi Tsimpli.

Read more about our research on the topic of children in the ̽��ֱ��'s research magazine; download a pdf; view on Issuu.

Multilingualism is the norm in India. But rather than enjoying the cognitive and learning advantages seen in multilingual children in the Global North, Indian children show low levels of learning basic school skills. Professor Ianthi Tsimpli is trying to disentangle the causes of this paradox.

̽��ֱ��trick may be to bridge school skills with life skills and make use of the richness of a child’s life experience to help them learn in the most effective ways possible

Ianthi Tsimpli

One of the partner schools

Research partnership

Co-Investigators (India)
National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences, Karnataka (Prof. Suvarna Alladi); ̽��ֱ��English & Foreign Languages ̽��ֱ��, Hyderabad (Dr Lina Mukhopadhyay); Jawaharlal Nehru ̽��ֱ��, New Delhi (Prof. Minati Panda)

Co-Investigators (UK)
̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge (Dr Dénes Szucs); ̽��ֱ�� of Reading (Prof. Theodore Marinis and Prof. Jeanine Treffers-Daller)

Project partners
British Council, India
Language and Learning Foundation (India)
Bilingualism Matters (UK)
Quest for Learning (UK)
̽��ֱ��Communication Trust (UK)

Funding
ESRC Research Grant Number: ES/N010345/1

Yes

Black researchers shaping the future

ta385 — Wed, 10 Oct 2018 09:32:12 +0000

Read the full story here

As the UK marks Black History Month, researchers from across the ̽��ֱ�� talk about their route to Cambridge, their inspiration and their motivation.

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researchers

Yes

Postgraduate Pioneers 2017 #3

ta385 — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 10:59:47 +0000

Third in the series is Draško Kašćelan, a linguistics researcher hoping to help children with language development.

My research sets out to

I’m investigating figurative language understanding in bilingual children. Nowadays, speaking more than one language is becoming a norm worldwide. Similarly, using metaphors in everyday speech is more frequent than one might assume. This frequency of use helps the development of figurative language comprehension but since bilinguals don’t have equal exposure to both of their languages as corresponding monolinguals, there is a question of whether this lack of input affects how they understand metaphors.

I am also looking into the level of autistic traits in children, since these traits are often related to the difficulties in figurative language comprehension. Hopefully, this research will give insight into how language understanding develops in bilinguals, but also offer directions for future investigation of language development in clinical populations.

Day-to-Day

My work is split between office work and data collection. At the moment, I spend most of the time in my department but I sometimes prepare experimental tasks in a cafe. But when I’m collecting data that involves visiting primary schools outside of Cambridge which gives me a really interesting change of scene. This would typically include a session with a student in which he or she does a series of computer-based cognitive or language tasks designed to look like games. Some of the sessions also include act-out tasks with toys, which makes the whole data collection quite fun.

My best days

̽��ֱ��most interesting day I’ve had so far was during the pilot of my study when I got to talk to several children about the work that I do. Explaining to primary school kids what linguistics actually is ended up being quite a challenge, especially when I was asked how long it takes to learn a language and why I don’t speak Elvish.

I hope my work will lead to

̽��ֱ��improvement of support that bilingual children get when it comes to maintaining the use of their languages. Together with other experimental work in the field, I expect to make an impact on educational policies regarding foreign language learning, which is currently far from optimal in the UK. I also hope that the findings of my investigation will offer directions for future research of language development in both typically and atypically developing individuals.

It had to be Cambridge because

Apart from academic and financial support that Cambridge offers, one of the most valuable parts of this experience is the student community. Specifically, the college system offers opportunities to socialise with people from other academic fields and from various backgrounds. This is quite different from my undergraduate experience outside of Cambridge where I would mostly only interact mostly with people from my field, which sometimes makes engaging with other areas of interest harder.

With our Postgraduate Open Day fast-approaching (3 Nov), we introduce five PhD students who are already making waves at Cambridge.

I was asked how long it takes to learn a language and why I don’t speak Elvish.

Draško Kašćelan

Postgraduate Open Day

For more information about the ̽��ֱ��'s Postgraduate Open Day on 3rd November 2017 and to book to attend, please click here.

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Yes

Talk with Your Hands: a Cambridge Shorts film

amb206 — Fri, 18 Nov 2016 09:10:00 +0000

Talk with Your Hands: Communicating across the Sensory Spectrum opens with Hayden Dahmm speaking to camera. He is studying engineering and he’s blind. One of the benefits of being blind, he suggests, is that he is not distracted by physical appearance. ̽��ֱ��words people use, and how they use them, gives him “a genuine impression of the speaker”.

Louise Stern is a writer and artist. She is deaf and explains that her native tongue is American Sign Language. Speaking with her hands, she says: “ ̽��ֱ��body is eloquent and conveys layers of emotion and meaning.” When she describes how eye contact is, for a deaf person, an especially beautiful thing, she hesitates – and then says “it makes me feel like they see me”.

In just ten minutes, Talk with Your Hands conveys the richness of verbal and non-verbal languages and explores how our senses overlap and merge. Through interviews with blind and deaf people, interwoven with insights from neuroscientists, the film demonstrates how we communicate with sounds and gestures – and how each mode of communication has its own characteristics.

Sign language is not a translation of, or substitute for, verbal language. While spoken language is linear (produced through the channels of our mouths one word at a time), sign language is flowing and simultaneous. Similarly, the spoken word is not just the written word spoken out loud. It’s much more than that, explains Hayden, rather as “poetry is the things that cannot be translated”.

̽��ֱ��capacity for language is what sets mankind apart from other animals. Years ago, scientists looking at brain damage identified the parts of the brain responsible for speaking and comprehension, for hearing and seeing. Now we know that this understanding of how the brain works is far too simplistic: language, and the different ways we use it, colonises most of the brain.

Talk with Your Hands is one of four films made by Cambridge researchers for the 2016 Cambridge Shorts series, funded by Wellcome Trust ISSF. ̽��ֱ��scheme supports early career researchers to make professional quality short films with local artists and filmmakers. Researchers Craig Pearson (Wellcome Trust-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute) and Julio Chenchen Song (Department of Linguistics) collaborated with filmmaker Toby Smith.

̽��ֱ��capacity for language is what sets us apart from other animals. Talk with Your Hands, the third of four Cambridge Shorts films, explores the richness of sensory perception in interviews with blind and deaf people together with insights from neuroscientists.

Talk With Your Hands

Cambridge Shorts 2016 (Talk with Your Hands)

Actress Nadia Nadarajah recites a poem using British Sign Language

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Opinion: How the British military became a champion for language learning

Anonymous — Mon, 06 Jun 2016 14:07:04 +0000

When an army deploys in a foreign country, there are clear advantages if the soldiers are able to speak the local language or dialect. But what if your recruits are no good at other languages? In the UK, where language learning in schools and universities is facing a real crisis, the British army began to see this as a serious problem.

In a new report on the value of languages, my colleagues and I showcased how a new language policy instituted last year within the British Army, was triggered by a growing appreciation of the risks of language shortages for national security.

Following the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military sought to implement language skills training as a core competence. Speakers of other languages are encouraged to take examinations to register their language skills, whether they are language learners or speakers of heritage or community languages.

̽��ֱ��UK Ministry of Defence’s Defence Centre for Language and Culture also offers training to NATO standards across the four language skills – listening, speaking, reading and writing. Core languages taught are Arabic, Dari, Farsi, French, Russian, Spanish and English as a foreign language. Cultural training that provides regional knowledge and cross-cultural skills is still embryonic, but developing fast.

Cash incentives

There are two reasons why this is working. ̽��ֱ��change was directed by the vice chief of the defence staff, and therefore had a high-level champion. There are also financial incentives for army personnel to have their linguistic skills recorded, ranging from £360 for a lower-level western European language, to £11,700 for a high level, operationally vital linguist. Currently any army officer must have a basic language skill to be able to command a sub unit.

A British army sergeant visits a school in Helmand, Afghanistan. Defence Images/flickr.com, CC BY-NC

We should not, of course, overstate the progress made. ̽��ֱ��numbers of Ministry of Defence linguists for certain languages, including Arabic, are still precariously low and, according to recent statistics, there are no speakers of Ukrainian or Estonian classed at level three or above in the armed forces. But, crucially, the organisational culture has changed and languages are now viewed as an asset.

Too fragmented

̽��ֱ��British military’s new approach is a good example of how an institution can change the culture of the way it thinks about languages. It’s also clear that language policy can no longer simply be a matter for the Department for Education: champions for language both within and outside government are vital for issues such as national security.

This is particularly important because of the fragmentation of language learning policy within the UK government, despite an informal cross-Whitehall language focus group.

Experience on the ground illustrates the value of cooperation when it comes to security. For example, in January, the West Midlands Counter Terrorism Unit urgently needed a speaker of a particular language dialect to assist with translating communications in an ongoing investigation. ̽��ֱ��MOD was approached and was able to source a speaker within another department.

There is a growing body of research demonstrating the cost to business of the UK’s lack of language skills. Much less is known about their value to national security, defence and diplomacy, conflict resolution and social cohesion. Yet language skills have to be seen as an asset, and appreciation is needed across government for their wider value to society and security.

Wendy Ayres-Bennett, Professor of French Philology and Linguistics, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Wendy Ayres-Bennett (Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics) discusses the impact of the military's new language policy.

Defence Images

A British army sergeant visits a school in Helmand, Afghanistan.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

For image use please see separate credits above.

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Cambridge app maps decline in regional diversity of English dialects

sjr81 — Thu, 26 May 2016 09:26:27 +0000

̽��ֱ��English Dialects App (free for Android and iOS) was launched in January 2016 and has been downloaded more than 70,000 times. To date, more than 30,000 people from over 4,000 locations around the UK have provided results on how certain words and colloquialisms are pronounced. A new, updated version of the app – which attempts to guess where you’re from at the end of the quiz – is available for download from this week.

Based on the huge new dataset of results, researchers at Cambridge, along with colleagues at the universities of Bern and Zurich, have been able to map the spread, evolution or decline of certain words and colloquialisms compared to results from the original survey of dialect speakers in 313 localities carried out in the 1950s.

One of the major findings is that some features of regional accents, such as pronouncing the 'r' in words like 'arm' – a very noticeable pronunciation feature which was once normal throughout the West Country and along much of the south coast – are disappearing in favour of the pronunciations found in London and the South-East (see map slideshow).

Lead researcher Dr Adrian Leemann, from Cambridge’s Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, said: “When it comes to language change in England, our results confirm that there is a clear pattern of levelling towards the English of the south-east; more and more people are using and pronouncing words in the way that people from London and the south-east do.

Professor David Britain from the ̽��ֱ�� of Bern added: “People in Bristol speak much more similarly to those in Colchester now than they did fifty years ago. Regional differences are disappearing, some quite quickly. However, while many pockets of resistance to this levelling are shrinking, there is still a stark north-south divide in the pronunciation of certain key words.”

Dialect words are even more likely to have disappeared than regional accents, according to this research. Once, the word ‘backend’ instead of ‘autumn’ was common in much of England, but today very few people report using this word (see map slideshow).

However, the research has shown some areas of resistance to the patterns of overall levelling in dialect. Newcastle and Sunderland stood out from the rest of England with the majority of people from those areas continuing to use local words and pronunciations which are declining elsewhere. For example, many people in the North-East still use a traditional dialect word for 'a small piece of wood stuck under the skin', 'spelk' instead of Standard English 'splinter'.

Other dialect words, like ‘shiver’ for ‘splinter’, are still reported in exactly the same area they were found historically—although they are far less common than they once were (see map slideshow).

̽��ֱ��data collected to date shows that one northern pronunciation has proved especially robust: saying words like 'last' with a short vowel instead of a long one. In this case, the northern form actually appears to have spread southwards in the Midlands and the West Country compared with the historical survey.

In other cases, new pronunciations were found to be spreading. Pronouncing words like 'three' with an 'f' was only found in a tiny region in the south east in the 1950s, but the data from today show this pronunciation is much more widespread – 15% of respondents reported saying 'free' for 'three', up from just 2% in the old Atlas.

Cambridge PhD student Tam Blaxter, who worked alongside Dr Leemann to map the 30,000 responses supplied by the public, suggests that greater geographical mobility is behind the changes when compared to the first systematic nationwide investigation of regional speech, the Survey of English Dialects from the 1950s.

“There has been much greater geographical mobility in the last half century,” said Blaxter. “Many people move around much more for education, work and lifestyle and there has been a significant shift of population out of the cities and into the countryside.

“Many of the results have confirmed what language experts might predict – but until now we just didn’t have the geographical breadth of data to back up our predictions. If we were to do the survey in another 60-70 years we might well see this dialect levelling expanding further, although some places like the north-east seem to have been especially good at preserving certain colloquialisms and pronunciations.”

When the app was originally launched in January, users were quizzed about the way they spoke 26 different words or phrases. ̽��ֱ��academics behind the app wanted to see how English dialects have changed, spread or levelled out since the Survey of English Dialects. ̽��ֱ��1950s project took eleven years to complete and captured the accents and dialects of mainly farm labourers.

Perhaps one of the most surprising results of the data provided so far is how the use of ‘scone’ (to rhyme with ‘gone’ rather than ‘cone’) is much more common in the north of England that many might imagine (see map slideshow).

Adrian Leemann said: “Everyone has strong views about how this word is pronounced but until we launched the app in January, we knew rather little about who uses which pronunciation and where. Our data shows that for the North and Scotland, ‘scone’ rhymes with ‘gone’, for Cornwall and the area around Sheffield it rhymes with ‘cone’ – while for the rest of England, there seems to be a lot of community-internal variation. In the future we will further unpick how this distribution is conditioned socially.”

̽��ֱ��launch of the English Dialects App in January has also allowed language use in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to be compared with language use in England (the original 1950s survey was limited to England and similar surveys of the other parts of the UK were not undertaken at the same time or using the same methods).

̽��ֱ��huge levels of feedback have also meant the team have improved the prediction of where users might be from. ̽��ֱ��app now correctly places 25 per cent of respondents within 20 miles, compared with 37 miles for the old method.

Regional diversity in dialect words and pronunciations could be diminishing as much of England falls more in line with how English is spoken in London and the south-east, according to the first results from a free app developed by Cambridge researchers.

More and more people are using and pronouncing words in the way that people from London and the south-east do.

Adrian Leemann

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Urgent action needed to close UK languages gap

sjr81 — Tue, 24 May 2016 09:36:38 +0000

̽��ֱ��findings are included in a new report, ̽��ֱ��Value of Languages, published by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge this week, after wide-ranging consultation with government bodies and agencies including the MoD, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, GCHQ, and the Department for Education.

̽��ֱ��report argues for the full contribution of languages to the UK economy and society to be realised across government, rather than falling solely under the remit of the Department for Education, thereby allowing a centralised approach in how language impacts the UK in almost every sphere of 21st-century life.

Recent independent research, highlighted within the report, indicates the language deficit could be costing the UK economy billions of pounds per year.

̽��ֱ��Value of Languages draws on discussions at a workshop held in Cambridge, co-chaired by Professor Wendy Ayres-Bennett of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, and Baroness Coussins, Co-Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Languages. ̽��ֱ��workshop was attended by representatives from across government and is likely to inform future policy decisions in this area.

Professor Ayres-Bennett said: “It is vital that we communicate clearly and simply the value of languages for the health of the nation. English is necessary, but not sufficient. We cannot leave language policy to the Department for Education alone.

“We need a more coordinated cross-government approach which recognises the value of languages to key issues of our time including security and defence, diplomacy and international relations, and social cohesion and peace-building. Our report aims to raise awareness of the current deficiencies in UK language policy, put forward proposals to address them, and illustrate the strategic value of languages to the UK.”

̽��ֱ��report also suggests:

Education policy for languages must be grounded in national priorities and promote a cultural shift in the attitude towards languages.
Language policy must be underpinned by organisational cultural change. ̽��ֱ��report highlights how cultural change is being achieved, for example, in the military with language skills being valued and rewarded financially. Military personnel are encouraged to take examinations to record their language skills, regardless of whether they are language learners or speakers of community or heritage languages.
Champions for languages both within and outside government are vital.

“Whereas the STEM subjects are specifically highlighted under the responsibilities for the Minister of State for Universities and Science, and there is a Chief Government Scientist, languages lack high-level champions within parliament and Whitehall,” added Ayres-Bennett. “Modern languages also need media champions. Figures such as Simon Schama for history or Brian Cox for physics and astronomy have helped bring the importance of these subjects to the public’s attention.”

Imminent or immediate problems for government to address include the decline of languages and language learning in the UK from schools through to higher education, where language departments and degree courses are closing; business lost to UK companies through lack of language skills; and an erosion of the UK’s ‘soft power’ in conflict and matters of national security, which are currently limited by a shortage of speakers of strategically important languages

̽��ֱ��report finds that the UK is also under-represented internationally, for instance in the EU civil service or in the translating and interpreting departments of the UN – and that the community and heritage languages spoken in the UK are often undervalued.

“A UK strategy for languages would mean that UK businesses can participate fully in the global market place using the language and communication skills of their workforce,” said Professor Ayres-Bennett.

“It would also mean that the UK is able to maximise its role and authority in foreign policy through language and diplomacy. Educational attainment in a wide range of languages brings with it personal cognitive benefits as well as the ‘cultural agility’ vital to international relations and development, as well as enhancing the cultural capital and social cohesion of the different communities of the UK.”

̽��ֱ��report cites a number of case studies illustrating the value of languages. For example, a Spanish linguist recruited to GCHQ was from her first day able to use her ‘street language’ acquired during her year abroad and her knowledge of certain Latin American countries to translate communications related to an international drugs cartel looking to transport cocaine into the UK. Comparing her analysis with those developed by two of her language community colleagues in Russian and Urdu, she was able to create a clear intelligence picture of the likely methods and dates of the imminent drugs importation. Meetings with Law Enforcement agents eventually led to the seizure of large quantities of cocaine and lengthy jail terms for the key players.

Policy workshops and briefings will be a key element of a new £4m research project on multilingualism led by Professor Ayres-Bennett at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, and funded under the AHRC’s Open World Research Initiative.

̽��ֱ��full report can be seen here: http://www.publicpolicy.cam.ac.uk/research-impact/value-of-languages

̽��ֱ��UK Government needs to urgently adopt a new, comprehensive languages strategy if it is to keep pace with its international competitors and reduce a skills deficit that has wide-reaching economic, political, and military effects.

It is vital that we communicate clearly and simply the value of languages for the health of the nation. English is necessary, but not sufficient.

Wendy Ayres-Bennett

̽��ֱ��Language Centre, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

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