Our regular news service will be suspended from today until Friday 4 January. We look forward to welcoming back all MFLE visitors in 2008 and hope for a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year for all.

Pew Internet has published a report on how teenagers are creating and sharing content online. The press release about the report says, ‘Content creation by teenagers continues to grow, with 64% of online teenagers ages 12 to 17 engaging in at least one type of content creation, up from 57% of online teens in 2004. […]

The TESS reports that the demands of teaching pupils with languages as diverse as Nepali and Lithuanian are putting strains on schools even in rural Scotland, prompting the two largest teaching unions to demand more government support.
The Educational Institute of Scotland and the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association have made separate pleas for more English as […]

The BBC reports that primary schools in England will receive about £340 extra each next year to support compulsory languages teaching.
From 2010 all those over seven must learn a foreign language. That change, plus a recommendation that £50m be spent on language learning, was accepted by ministers in the spring after an independent review. The […]

Children with English as their first language are in the minority in more than 1,300 schools, according to official figures.
This article on the Guardian website says that data from the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) obtained by the Daily Telegraph shows that in 1,338 primary and secondary schools in England there are fewer […]

Topics covered in this month’s English Language Teaching diary in the Guardian are:
China’s New Oriental gets warm embrace in US
New Oriental, China’s biggest English language teaching provider, is reaping the benefits of its flotation on the New York Stock Exchange last year.
Ireland races to raise skills to serve migrant pupils
The recent surge in Ireland’s immigrant […]

Comhairle nan Eilean Siar (Western Isles Council) is to conduct all its committee meetings in Gaelic, the Herald reports.
At the moment only some committee meetings are conducted in Gaelic but the council, which was set up in 1976, has now decided that all committee meetings and the full council will be held in the native […]

Edinburgh’s Confucius Institute has been hailed a role model for similar establishments around the world, the Scotsman reports. The Edinburgh University institute - set up to promote the Chinese language and culture in Scotland - was honoured in Tiananmen Square, Beijing.
Read more on the Scotsman website.

The BBC reports that First Minister Alex Salmond will pledge an extra £7.5m to safeguard the future of the Gaelic language this week.
Mr Salmond will unveil the funding increase when he delivers the annual Sabhal Mor Ostaig lecture on Wednesday. The money will be spent on education, the national plan for the language and also […]

Last month we published the French Reference Grammar and we have now added the German Reference Grammar which covers:

verbs - cases, tenses, adverbs and more
nouns, pronouns and articles
adjectives
prepositions
language relating to time, dates, numbers, weather and greetings
word order in German

For your convenience, you can also download the entire resource as a PDF or Word document.
Coming soon […]