The international dimension of learning, says the British Council’s John Low, is all about belonging to a community. It’s about seeing the importance and opportunity within an international community. It’s about preparing youngsters for jobs we can’t visualise in places we don’t know yet. The British Council’s Global Gateway programme helps set up the kind of links that make it easier to be part of this international community.

The global village

Travel is shrinking the world. Some colleagues have traveled from Glasgow to Chicago. For the weekend. It’s as easy to get to the other side of the world as it is to get to London.

The environment has made our world smaller. What happens in one corner of the world 8000 miles away affects us here and now. The next major war is, it is feared, going to be fought over water, not oil.

Information and communications have changed, to allow us to watch television from the perspective of another country, to see what we want when we want it, online, 24/7.

Politics has led to more freedom of movement in Europe, with huge shifts of population from the East of Europe to, in particular, the UK, changing the languages climate almost overnight. New challenges exist not just for modern languages teachers, but for teachers of English, too.

The challenge

Language-learning offers possibly the greatest chance to explore these challenges of our current world, as well as a medium through which to communicate and discover them. Yet, continually, we see languages education being eroded by policies of Local Authorities and schools who see languages as being only for a certain type of student (Ed’s note: it would seem from this we’re almost seeing a move back to 1950s attitudes of who studies languages). This, almost certainly, through a perception of difficulty in language learning.

However, it’s the learning approaches, how we innovate them, enhance problem-solving, offer intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to learn languages, through looking at how we put learning into real-life contexts, offering them support, emphasising the relevance to employability. Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence opens these doors up, and it’s up to Scotland’s languages teaching profession to seize this opportunity.

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