Language Education in Creating a Multilingual Europe

The European Union has conceived itself as multilingual since its beginning in 1956. EFNIL, the network of the central language institutions of all states of the Union and several other European countries, promotes the enhancement of individual plurilingualism of the people in Europe as an important prerequisite for European multilingualism. The EFNIL conference hosted 2011 by the British Council in London was devoted to the discussion of how individual plurilingualism is being achieved by language education in Europe. In this volume, several general reflections on the main topic are followed by a critical discussion of present language instruction in the United Kingdom and reports on foreign language education in various other countries. Reports on four current projects that aim to describe the present linguistic diversity of Europe follow. A detailed interim report on the results of one of these projects (ELM) concludes the book.