SurveyLang
With 2008 being the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue and the new multilingualism strategy due in September, this is clearly an important issue on the European Commission's agenda. In fact, multilingualism has increasingly been in the limelight since 2002 when the European Council in Barcelona called for further action "...to improve the mastery of basic skills, in particular by teaching at least two foreign languages from a very early age" and "for the establishment of a linguistic competence indicator" to remedy the current lack of valid comparable data at the European level.
In line with this agenda, Gallup has, as part of a wider consortium called SurveyLang, been mandated by the Commission to carry out a pioneering survey on the language competences of young Europeans. Other SurveyLang members are the Dutch National Institute for Educational Measurement (CITO), Cambridge ESOL, the Goethe Institut, the Centre International d'Etudes Pédagogiques (CIEP), the Instituto Cervantes, the University of Salamanca and the University of Perugia.
Gallup will be in charge of the highly complex sampling and fieldwork operations and will also design the computer-based testing platform of the survey. The survey should cover tests in the first and second most taught official European languages, namely English, French, German, Spanish and Italian. A minimum of 1,000 students per language per country will have their listening, reading and writing skills tested. The survey is meant to provide the data necessary to construct a European language indicator.
