In the debate over making language classes available to all students I have several times heard disparaging remarks to the effect that students should be taught to do more than order a latte or a meal. (I'll come back at the end to something about the latte.) The view seems to be that if we are to offer language options to, say, computer scientists or psychologists, physicists or architects, they should learn the language to the level where they can practice their discipline in that tongue. Let me tell you my own experience.
It may not be much of a claim to make - but for a period of years I believe I was the third best-known British human geographer in Portugal. I first went to Portugal in 1999 at the invitation of a colleague I had first met as part of a European Science Foundation network 15 years earlier. I don't like to be in places where I don't speak at least a bit of the language - a 'get by' amount. I spent a few hours on a Portuguese phrase book and watched part of a BBC language course. All the proceedings at that first meeting I went to in Lisbon were conducted in English, but I showed to my hosts that I had been prepared to go part way towards them. Unlike other English-speakers there, I was invited back - and within three or four years I was Principal Investigator on a major research grant from a Portuguese funding body, working to evaluate policies for social exclusion in the poorest neighbourhoods of Lisbon and Oporto. For some years I maintained close contacts with colleagues in a number of Poruguese universities - Lisbon, the Portuguese Open University, Oporto. I edited a book with Portuguese colleagues, and one of my last research articles was a two-hander on the ways the UK and Portugal have dealt with issues of citizenship for migrants from ex-colonies.
My Portuguese is still confined to 'get by' standard (although I can now also peruse Portuguese publications and get some sense out of them). But it was having a 'get by' knowledge of the language that opened up opportunities to me. On the other hand in the past I have lectured and given conference papers in both French and Italian (although both are now somewhat rusty) and I have passable German. My Portuguese is a classic example of the law of comparative advantage. That 'law' says that it is better to specialise in the thing where you have the greatest margin over your competitors, than in the thing that you are best at. I am best at French, but I have the greatest margin over competitors in Portuguese. English is the international language of science and of commerce, but a get by knowledge of another language can open doors, particularly if it is a tongue that others don't speak. I would like all our students to have a get by knowledge of a language other than English - and preferably more than one. And if one of those is a language other than those still most commonly spoken by people from the UK then so much the better. A little Arabic, or Mandarin, or Portuguese, or Russian (all of which we offer as part of 'Languages for All') ca go a very long way.
What about that latte? Teaching students to be able to operate in Italian would also be a great thing - and they would learn that ordering a latte in Italy will generally bring them a glass of milk.
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