Modern Languages Blog

Lessons in construction and the relevant English required are helping the unemployed return to work.

Knowing the term ‘dovetail joint’ may be the passport to a career in construction for Said Madarbukus. Despite being a builder for 25 years in Mauritius, 50-year-old Madarbukus’s level of English has made it hard for him to find work since he came to Britain four years ago. Now a north London local authority’s pilot scheme, which ‘embeds’ conversational and vocational English into a construction course, may be his best hope.

Read this story on the Education Guardian website.

A partnership between Napier University and two universities in China could pave the way for widespread changes in language teaching.

Read this story on the Scotsman website.

Lack of provision for English lessons is preventing migrants learning the language, says James Simpson in the Education Guardian.

He writes: ‘The government’s communities secretary, Ruth Kelly, laid into translation services last week on the BBC’s Politics Show. Having information translated, she said, means people have no reason to learn English. “For example,” she said, “it’s quite possible for someone to come here from Pakistan … and to find that materials are routinely translated into their mother tongue, and therefore not have the incentive to learn English.” ‘

Read the full article in the Education Guardian.

The BBC reports on what’s happening at Woodhill Primary School, Bishopbriggs.

Children in the pilot group at the school are using blogs to communicate with schools across the UK and Europe and making podcasts on a range of subjects, including French language.

Recordings of their voices can be heard on MP3 files, speaking French with accents which have astounded experts across all educational sectors.

Woodhill Primary School’s blog entries can be seen on the MFLE’s blog posts page, which monitors their blog along with many other MFL blogs.

We’ve just added a new section ‘Motivation in the Language-Learning Classroom’, which features video interviews with Zoltan Dörnyei.

Zoltan is Professor of Psycholinguistics in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham and was one of the keynote speakers at the Scottish CILT National Conference in June 2005, where he spoke about motivation and second language acquisition.

Also included in this section are points for reflection to help you consider the levels of motivation in your classroom, and how to boost these.

This material is provided by Scottish CILT and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 UK: Scotland License.

The Gaelic section of the Scottish Arts Council website features a Book of the Month and Word of the Month.

This month’s word is ’sunndach’ (lively, contented, hearty).

The Scots section of the Scottish Arts Council website features a Poem of the month and Word of the Month. This month’s word is ‘cuddy’ (donkey).

Councils should encourage immigrants to learn English instead of routinely translating documents into foreign languages, Ruth Kelly, the Communities Secretary, said yesterday. Ms Kelly said that translation had been used too frequently and could become a ‘crutch’ that discouraged integration. The practice enabled new immigrants to avoid learning English when they first arrived, meaning that they never did, she said.

Ms Kelly said that there were cases ’such as in a casualty ward’ in which translation was necessary, but that learning and using the English language was key to helping migrants to integrate.

Read this article on the Times Online website.