For this purpose we have selected the English Language Teaching Centre or ELTC as a key training provider.

UNESCO: ��

The new poll on schools' attitudes was carried out by The Times Educational Supplement and the Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research.

BBC: Delay as language learning dwindles

That said, there is more to handling call-centre queries than simply understanding language and looking things up in databases.

ECONOMIST: Monitor: Call and response | The

Even now, Sheffield University's Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language, home of the three editors of this dictionary, is recording a newly dying trade, mining.

ECONOMIST: Johnson: The words we have lost | The

The pre-eminence of the City as a financial centre and of English as the language of world business are also both vital in pulling in foreign workers.

ECONOMIST: Employment

The previous centre-left government in Budapest disliked moves such as a language law that criminalises the public use of Hungarian in some contexts.

ECONOMIST: Hungary and Slovakia

In the Netherlands too there have been some interesting recent currents, with the centre right party expressing greater reservations about European integration, expropriating some of the language once confined to the extremes.

BBC: Why is Cameron's Europe speech so significant?

The figure at the centre of the action - the caller - traditionally announces each number in a language so familiar it has become corny: "Two fat ladies - 88", "clickety click - 66".

BBC: Online bingo: A very full house