aclcOctober 4th, 2006
Last week I was fortunate enough to be invited to the European Award for Languages ceremony not, as usual, in London but down the road in the Scottish Parliament. It was a real pleasure to hear about some highly innovative teaching, some with technology some without any at all. You can get a flavour for what is going on, too, and pick up a few teaching and learning ideas on the way. I enjoyed seeing – or rather hearing – young translators from the booths doing spontaneous interpreting of multilingual debates within the Parliament chamber.
You can now access the video archive over at Holyrood TV. It’s worth listening to just the first two minutes to hear how many languages our Presiding Officer, George Reid, is able to speak, including Gaelic.
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aclcOctober 3rd, 2006
MFLE visitors are an organised lot – there have been over 500 downloads of the MFLE’s Christmas-related plays already. There are Christmas plays in French, German and Italian, as well as a Cinderella play in French. All stories can be adapted, however, to suit whichever language you are teaching.
There’s also a new lesson pack in this section to help you with the “How” of putting on a play in a modern language.
You can find the plays and lesson pack in the MFLE drama section.
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aclcOctober 2nd, 2006
A Scottish CILT study has found that more than 100 languages are currently spoken in Scotland’s schools, with at least 12,000 children capable of such diverse tongues as Arabic, Bengali, Cantonese, Dutch, Farsi, Hebrew, and Hindi. This article in the Herald has more details.
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aclcOctober 2nd, 2006
A new book suggests people are keen to coin new insults in the English language, such as ‘tanorexic’, according to this BBC article. There are also lots of new verbs, such as “smirt” (to smoke and flirt). How many have you heard of? Your students will almost certainly know them all…
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Last week I was fortunate enough to be invited to the European Award for Languages ceremony not, as usual, in London but down the road in the Scottish Parliament. It was a real pleasure to hear about some highly innovative teaching, some with technology some without any at all. You can get a flavour for what is going on, too, and pick up a few teaching and learning ideas on the way. I enjoyed seeing – or rather hearing – young translators from the booths doing spontaneous interpreting of multilingual debates within the Parliament chamber.