ISAPL — SYMPOSIUM ON THE TEACHING OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES

ISAPL — 13TH CONGRESS — 2024 — SYMPOSIUM ON THE TEACHING OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES (DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.11735.80803)

In our present pandemic situation — and it will last in a way or another for several years and leave traces behind for maybe a generation, or more — we are confronted with two emergencies and not one. And these two emergencies have to solve a problem common to both. The two emergencies are of course the pandemic itself first of all, and second the climate crisis. Both emergencies require global unity or at least global coordination to decide on the solutions and the political actions necessary to cope with the tension emerging in the world and devise actions that will alleviate the catastrophe some are announcing as being cataclysmic. This demands an important level of globalization, and this can only be achieved with the possibility to communicate, hence the necessity to spread the teaching of foreign languages to the entire world. Not one foreign language, that would henceforth be declared universal.

This is not feasible because language is an identity symbol and existential entity that can in no way be rejected, or even only neglected. It has to be the choice of every linguistic community to determine which language they will use in the…