Section 1. Guidelines for reading texts on the use of English in European education
It is part of the EU’s multilingualism policy to encourage all citizens to learn and speak more languages, in order to improve mutual understanding and communication. Multilingualism is regarded as a form of empowerment, which, however, includes the appropriation of English to a degree that may eventually give rise to a European variety of English.
The education systems in Europe, particularly at the university level, are in the process of becoming more mutually compatible, with the result that English is becoming more prevalent not only as the lingua franca of research but also of instruction. It should therefore surprise no one that EU research programmes are administered completely in English.
What might a European variety English be like? Projects aimed at collecting and analyzing samples of intra-European English have been launched in the last few years, but a linguistic description still lies some distance in the future. The term Euro-English was first used to denote the particular register of English spoken by bureaucrats in multinational discussions in Brussels, but is also used to denote the emerging variety of English spoken as a lingua franca by EU residents. If Euro-English were one day to become a recognized, standardizing variety of World English, would it be a target language to be taught in European schools? And, if this were the case, how might English teaching have to change? These are among the questions that arise as work on the description of Euro-English progresses. Some of these questionss are discussed in the article by an American teacher Mercia Mcneil who lived in Swtzerland and taught English for two years at a Swiss German university