Children as young as nine are to be given the chance to learn Chinese at one of Edinburgh’s top private schools.
Fiona MacFarlane, spokeswoman for George Watson’s College, in Colinton Road, said: ‘Our pupils will be introduced to Mandarin in P5, when it will be an extra-curricular option. In P6 they will all learn some Mandarin as part of their Chinese studies.’
Read this article on the Scotsman website.
Business leaders are pressing for more youngsters to learn languages in schools to help them compete in the global marketplace.The call comes as new figures reveal fewer S3 and S4 pupils are learning foreign languages than ten years ago, although more are being taught at S5 and S6.
Edinburgh’s Chamber of Commerce is set to push for a target of all pupils leaving school with at least one foreign language in curriculum meetings it holds with the local authority and headteachers.
Read this article on the Scotsman website.
Police in a County Durham town are to be issued with prompt cards to help them communicate with the area’s growing Polish community.
About 600 Polish people currently live in Consett and more are expected to arrive to work over the summer.
The cards will contain phrases such as ‘Are you injured?’ or ‘Please turn your music down.’
Officers will hold up the cards and point to the phrases, rather than attempting to pronounce the words.
Read this story on the BBC website.
The number of students taking non-curricular languages for the Leaving Cert in Ireland has boomed over the past 12 months and is now almost double the figure a year ago.
Non-curricular languages are those which do not appear as part of the normal school curriculum but which students may opt to be examined on.
Some 265 candidates will sit exams in languages such as Latvian, Polish and Lithuanian over the coming days.
And, for the first time, Romanian and Bulgarian have been added to the list.
Read this article on the Independent in Ireland website,
The number of adults learning languages in local authority and FE college classes is continuing to decline according to initial findings from CILT’s survey of adult language learning, carried out in conjunction with NIACE and the Association for Language Learning earlier this year.
Read the full story on the CILT website.
Internet law professor Michael Geist argues that delays to multilingual domain names are holding back internet diversity.
Imagine if each time a British internet user entered an e-mail or website address, they would be required to include a Chinese or Cyrillic character.
For millions of non-English speakers around the world, this is precisely what they experience when they use the internet as the domain name system is unable to fully accommodate their local language.
Read this article on the BBC website.
As many as 4,000 responses to a proposed new Irish language law have been sent to the government, as a consultation period comes to an end.
Read this story on the BBC website.
Welsh language channel S4C is to broadcast a current affairs programme with Polish subtitles.
Read the full story on the BBC website.
Chinese is the key foreign language in Russia’s Far East where people look across the border for goods and jobs.
Read this article on the BBC website.
A small group of protesters of South Asian origin have marched through central Hong Kong demanding more schooling in the English language.
Read this article on the BBC website.
Blog feed