Every graduate a linguist: building strategic language capability through IWLP

The case study described in this report has been carried out for the Born Global language policy research project. The overall aim of Born Global is to understand in more detail the deficit and the demand in language capability in the UK, both with regard to the wider economy and more narrowly in relation to academic research. A more comprehensive understanding, it is hoped, can “inform government language policy development” as well as “future developments in Higher Education language curricula and assessment” (British Academy 2014). Our research has to be seen in this wider context and focuses on the supply side of language skills in HE language courses which are part of so-called Institution Wide Language Provision or Programmes (IWLP). In the first section some overview numerical data is presented to give a very brief outline of IWLP in the UK higher education sector, before describing and analysing the results of a case study conducted at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). 1 The case study focused on student motivation for language learning, their plurilingual competencies, sense of attainment and progress and their overall evaluation and understanding of language learning processes