The Arabic language was guest of honour at this year's "expolangues" exhibition, reports David Tresilian from Paris Events in Egypt cast a shadow over this year's edition of "expolangues," a professional event for all those working with or through foreign languages that ran from 2 to 5 February at the exhibition grounds at Porte de Versailles in Paris. Some events were cancelled or hastily modified, speakers from Egypt being unable to be present as planned, and few of the events that did take place, including lectures, panel discussions and classroom activities, failed to refer to the developments that have shaken first Tunisia and then Egypt over recent weeks. However, with or without some of its participants the fair went ahead on schedule, some 200 teaching companies, public- sector organisations and publishing houses with language- teaching lists sending representatives to the expolangues event, now in its 29th year and one of the largest of its kind in Europe. Arabic was the guest of honour at this year's fair, and partnerships with ALECSO, the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organisation, and various French government and European institutions had allowed an ambitious programme of seminars and other events to be organised on its margins, providing a kind of tour d'horizon of Arabic teaching in France today and to a certain extent also in Europe. Perspectives, it turns out, are mixed. While speaker after speaker in the events programme emphasised the importance of Arabic as a language that had at least as great a commercial and political importance for Europe as Chinese or Russian, both seen as extra-European languages that it is important for European young people and others to learn, it seemed that despite the efforts of the French educational system and ALECSO disappointingly few French young people, and presumably even fewer Europeans, in fact learn Arabic. Visiting the expolangues event, it was hard not to be conscious of the impressive efforts being made to market Chinese and Russian, with representatives of the official bodies present at the fair pressing handfuls of glossy materials onto passers- by. European languages, notably German and Spanish, were also being energetically promoted, the German and Spanish cultural authorities having long invested in a network of language-teaching and cultural institutions abroad. Similar efforts have not always been successful in promoting Arabic, at least in France, and one reason has apparently been the varieties of Arabic spoken in the Arab world. Since 1999, Arabic has been officially recognised as one of the "languages of France," putting it on a par with regional languages like Breton or Occitan, and the country already has some three million Arabic speakers, notably as a result of immigration from the countries of the Arab Maghreb, chiefly Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. However, such speakers tend to speak Arabic only at home or in the family context, and they do not study in the language or use it professionally, which in any case would not be legal in France where French must be used for educational and professional purposes. Should they want to study the language at school, aiming perhaps to take Arabic for the school-leaving baccalauréat exam that prescribes one or more foreign languages, it is the standard written language that is set and not one of the Maghreb dialects. This may have discouraged French native speakers of Arabic, who might otherwise be supposed to have advantages over other young learners of the language. According to figures available at expolangues, while 239 French schools offered Arabic teaching in 2009, including 134 lycées where pupils prepare the baccalauréat, the number of candidates examined in the language has been in freefall since 2001, when oral examinations in the Maghreb dialects were abolished and all students were obliged to take their exams in the standard language. While some 10,000 French high-school students took Arabic in Maghreb dialect form as part of their baccalauréat in 1999, compared to 1,770 in the same year for the standard language, this figure had fallen to 6,000 in total by 2010, most of these studying Arabic as a second or third language and representing only 2% of secondary school students. Chinese, by contrast, is apparently now studied by 19,000 French secondary school pupils. While the number of students studying Arabic in France is disappointing, speakers at expolangues nevertheless identified features of the country's education system that make it stand out from other European countries as far as Arabic teaching and learning is concerned. Among these is the presence in France of a significant population of native speakers of Arabic and the links, familial, cultural or commercial, such people have to their countries of origin. Various forms of Arabic can be heard spoken in the streets of most French cities, and cultural expressions fusing French and particularly Maghreb Arabic are popular among the country's young people, notably in the form of North African rai music. As a result of the popularity of French-North African singers, actors and filmmakers, words from Maghreb dialects of Arabic have passed into the French language, French filmmaker Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche casually including Arabic words in the titles of his films Wesh wesh, qu'est-ce qui se passe? and Bled Number One, for example, in the confidence that they will be understood by a wide public. Wesh is an Algerian dialect word meaning young man, while bled is the Maghreb pronunciation of balad, or country, in standard Arabic. French business interests in the countries of the Arab Maghreb in particular remain strong, making it likely that Arabic teaching will have a higher profile in France than in many other European countries. In addition to such demographic and other considerations, France, it was also explained at expolangues, supports the teaching of Arabic as part of government policy to promote linguistic diversity. Arabic is taught to degree level in 22 French universities, in addition to various grandes écoles, among them INALCO, the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales, founded in 1795 and employing the famous orientalist Silvestre de Sacy as its first professor of Arabic. Some six to seven thousand students study Arabic in French universities, and France is the only country in Europe, perhaps the only country outside the Arab world, in which Arabic is taught from primary to degree level in the public education system. Speaking at expolangues, the director of the agence pour l'enseignement français à l'étranger, an umbrella body bringing together a network of 460 French schools in 130 countries, explained that French schools in Arab countries teach in Arabic as well as in French, meaning that the agency is also one of the world's largest Arabic-teaching networks, responsible for the education of some 108,000 pupils in 24 countries. Attractive Arabic language teaching materials have been developed by French government centres, notably the service de coopération et d'action culturelle in Morocco, also represented at expolangues. According to Bruno Levallois, chairman of the board of the Institut du monde arabe in Paris and one of the speakers at a seminar on language teaching in Arab countries, this network of French schools teaching Arabic can help develop educational techniques and materials in Arabic, drawing on the approach set out in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, a Council of Europe instrument setting out European standards for language learning and assessment. With all the attention given at the fair to Arabic, it was almost possible to overlook the one notable absentee from the fair, and also the elephant in the room, which was English. However, this was true only as far as the seminar events were concerned, since the truth is that there is no need to promote English-language teaching or learning, since it is already de rigueur for almost everybody everywhere. Figures released at expolangues, for example, indicated that some 98% of French young people learn English as their first, perhaps their only, foreign language, and these figures are likely to be similar in other European and non-European countries. A walk through the commercial section of the fair confirmed suspicions that educational publishers, reluctant to sponsor teaching materials in anything aside from a handful of foreign languages, are falling over themselves to produce ever-greater numbers of English-language textbooks for a market that seems in no danger of diminishing. Looking at the Arabic-teaching materials on display in the commercial section of the fair, on the other hand, it was hard not to be struck by how little was produced by commercial publishers. Luckily, there were some attractive textbooks available for use in French schools from primary level upwards, and these looked much better than such books used to, making use of real texts and video and multimedia materials. However, the six thousand pupils sitting the baccalauréat in Arabic each year are still tiny when compared to the hundreds of thousands sitting it in English, and this is reflected in the large investments being made in developing English-language teaching materials and the comparatively tiny amounts being invested in Arabic. Nevertheless, the books on show indicated how far Arabic teaching in Europe has come since the days when European teaching of the language took place, if it took place at all, in the manner of a dead language like Latin. Speaker after speaker at the fair's seminar events emphasised that Arabic must be taught as a living language, and even taught with commercial purposes in mind, as is apparently today the case for Chinese. That being so, one left this year's edition of expolangues with two thoughts in mind. The first was that while some French commercial publishers have responded to the needs of the educational books market, producing attractive textbooks designed for pupils taking Arabic as part of their baccalauréat, other European publishers have also taken a lead in producing attractively produced, though perhaps less rigorous, Arabic primers designed for the far-larger leisure and tourist market. Assimil, for example, publishers of the famous "sans peine" series of language teaching materials, the equivalent of the English "teach yourself" or other books, presented its Arabic list at the fair, which included an introductory Arabic course as well as shorter courses in Algerian, Egyptian, Lebanese, Moroccan, Tunisian and Gulf Arabic. These materials, designed for learners in extra-academic contexts and not going much beyond a barely intermediate level in the language, teach through the learning and repetition of basic structures. They tend to provoke distrust among some professional teachers of Arabic, among them those preparing students for public examinations, and yet they serve an important part, possibly even the larger part, of the European market for Arabic language-learning material. Rigorous though it may be, the French state educational system is failing to educate today's students in Arabic, judging by the freefall in numbers taking the subject for the baccalauréat, and yet there seems to be a clear interest among the general public for learning the language. An estimated 50,000 students learn Arabic outside the public education system in France, indicating that the demand is there, but that the state system is failing to cater to it. Could the authors of the traditional grammar-based textbooks, their methods inherited from the orientalists, not learn something from more learner- friendly methods? Even the impeccably serious Bruno Levallois, chairman of the Institut du monde arabe and inspecteur générale of the French educational system, seemed to be arguing in this direction when he suggested at the fair that the same "revolution" seen in recent years in the teaching of French, a language that for various reasons also varies widely between its written and oral forms, could take place in the teaching of Arabic, making it if not easier for European students to learn then at least more learner-friendly. A second thought is that aside from the business of selling books, much of the commercial activity at this year's expolangues was given over to selling language training courses abroad, often in the form of home-stay packages in which students stay with families while attending language classes. Such packages are big business in Europe, with many companies offering attractive-looking language holidays for students of all ages in European countries, as well as in Australia, Canada, the United States, China, Russia and Japan. Yet, aside from the residential packages being offered by various Lebanese institutions and those on offer from the American University in Cairo, it was difficult to find anyone at expolangues offering language holidays in Arab countries. One of the largest commercial operators was offering English language holidays in nine different countries, from England to South Africa and New Zealand, as well as home-stay language-learning packages in Japanese, Mandarin Chinese and Russian, with students staying with families in Tokyo, Beijing and Saint Petersburg, among other destinations. Where, though, were the Arabic home-stay packages? Such language home-stays need to be developed on a similar free commercial basis between Europe and the countries on the southern side of the Mediterranean and throughout the Arab world before Arabic language learning can really take off in Europe. Expolangues, la langue arabe, invitée d'honneur, 2-5 February 2011, Paris
