In Britain, there has been a decline in children taking foreign languages at school. This has started a discussion in The Guardian whether learning a second language is still valuable for native English speakers. Holt (2006) and Jacques (2006) both argue in favour of learning a second language but they have different approaches on the matter. This paper describes their arguments.  
 Holt (2006) states that native English speakers "have command of the most useful lingua franca" (Holt, 2006) and considers this as an argument for not learning another language. Jacques (2006) has the opinion that staying monolingual is an undesirable attitude. He disagrees with Holt's argument for two reasons. First, there are still many people who do not speak English. Second, English is not the world's most spoken language; Mandarin has twice as many speakers and English is closely followed by Hindi and Spanish. Furthermore, he argues that the status of English is "not necessarily cast in stone" (Jacques, 2006) and therefore the large number of people speaking English could not be a valid reason not to learn another language. Another language could also help to understand other people and their cultures better, he states, as language expresses a culture (Jacques, 2006).  
 Similar to Jacques, Holt (2006) finds that learning foreign languages has positive advantages. One argument for this is his own experience that this helps understanding one's own language.  It also has a benefit on the thinking-process: "[learning another language] helps you to think analytically rather than just instinctively: a skill which all students need to work on, no matter what subject they are studying" (Holt, 2006). 
 However, Holt (2006) is not satisfied with today's level of foreign language education. He states that students are not stimulated to take languages at school and that language teaching will suffer from this: "the less of us that study languages the less people there will be qualified to teach them in the future" (Holt, 2006). On the other side, both Holt (2006) and Jacques (2006) agree that learning  another language must be obligatory for young children and that this is a solution for making Britain less monolingual. Jacques (2006) also provides two other solutions. First, it must be made possible to learn widely spread languages - like Mandarin - that are not common European languages. Second, inhabitants of Britain should use the language skills of new inhabitants and "make integration a two-way process" (Jacques, 2006). In this way, people can learn from each other and this will help understand each other better. 

References
Holt, Richard. 'Why bother learning foreign languages?' The Guardian, 13 October 2006.
Jacques, Martin. 'Does it matter if we only speak English?' The Guardian, 15 December 2012.