The role of English has, for decades, been a topic of intense debate in higher education. The recent report by the British Council and Studyportals on the further expansion of the use of English beyond the ‘Big Four’ (Australia, Canada, United Kingdom and the United States) garnered widespread attention, as did the discussion in the Netherlands about the impact of 23% of the total student body comprising international students on the quality of teaching (in English) and services.
At the same time, efforts by the Chinese government to stimulate the learning and use of Mandarin in education (with limited success in the developed world through its Confucius Institutes, but more successfully in the Global South) are also in the news as is recent competition in this area from Taiwan.
The British Council-Studyportal study is based on an analysis of data on English Teaching Programmes (ETPs) and comes to the conclusion that “in the past five years, ETPs outside of the Big Four anglophone countries grew by 77%”, with the fastest-growing locations being the Chinese region and Sub-Saharan Africa.
More information: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20220105102039292