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 […]

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.

The first national daily newspaper in the Welsh language will be launched next year, it has been announced. Y Byd (The World) will be published on the first Monday of March, says the company behind it, Dyddiol Cyf.
 
Read this story on the BBC 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Ministers were today urged to reconsider their plans to restrict access to free English language classes for migrants in a government-commissioned report on integration. The report urged the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) to review the way it plans to allocate funds for English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) over the coming academic […]

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 […]