Modern Languages Blog

To celebrate the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue, the British Council is running two competitions under the theme of Collective Cultures to find out about young people’s experiences of other countries and cultures and developing relationships with people from different societies and backgrounds.

They are welcoming entries to a poster competition and a poetry competition, from young people across the educational spectrum.

Prizes include a new Archos 405 Portable Media Player and winning entries will feature in a special publication. The closing date for entries is Monday 2 June 2008.

Find out more from Collective Cultures information and entry forms PDF

A Memorandum of Understanding with Chinese universities has been signed by the University of Aberdeen and the University of Abertay Dundee.  The agreements, signed during Education Secretary, Fiona Hyslop’s visit to China this month, opens the way for stronger research collaboration and exchange between the Scottish universities and their Chinese counterparts. Hyslop said: ‘China presents us all with an opportunity to drive forward sustainable economic growth for Scotland, and collaborations like Aberdeen’s shown how Scottish research and technology can play a big part in the global marketplace. Abertay’s partnership with Shanghai University shows how Scottish institutions can really seize the opportunities opening up, benefiting them and Scotland as a whole.’Read more on this from Holyrood

New resources to help celebrate this year’s European Day of Languages on 26 September are now available to order from CILT’s online shop.

New resources for 2008 include packs of balloons featuring some favourite EDL characters, and pens decorated with the words ‘write to me’ in five languages. Other EDL resources include badges, t-shirts and starter packs.

The UK’s first initiative (in an Aberdeen school) in early partial immersion in a foreign language (EPPI) has been judged a success. From Primary 1 onwards, children receive some of their education through the medium of French, and some through the medium of English

Read the report ‘Evaluation of Walker Road’ 

Find out more from the BBC news

Last month we published the Spanish Reference Grammar and we have now added the Italian Reference Grammar which covers:

• verbs – cases, tenses, adverbs and more
• nouns and articles
• adjectives
• prepositions
• language relating to time, dates, numbers, weather and seasons

For your convenience, you can also download the entire resource as a PDF or Word document.

The Scottish Learning Festival takes place on 24 and 25 September at the SECC and Clyde Auditorium in Glasgow.

The main theme of this year’s event is Curriculum for Excellence with a focus on outcomes and experiential learning and innovation in the curriculum. Underpinning the main theme is Glow, the national education intranet being rolled out across Scotland.

Free to educationalists, the festival hosts keynote addresses, spotlight sessions and seminars, together with the largest education resources exhibition in Scotland.

Visit The Scottish Learning Festival 2008.

National Qualifications has created a collection of useful support materials to help teachers, students and parents prepare for exams. These include:

• The Sunday Herald exam guide 2008
• 2008 exam timetable
• Past paper questions
• Interactive study skills resource
• Guide to National Qualifications
• Popular revision resources

Find further information about these on the NQ exam preparation page

The draft experiences and outcomes for the technologies have been released on the Curriculum for Excellence website today (Monday 14 April).

These documents have been designed to provide information for all staff in all education establishments on the context and scope of the draft outcomes; they also explain what schools and centres should do with the draft outcomes.

Find out more on the Curriculum for Excellence website

I’m at the national languages conference, Language World, and have just done a speed-round of Thinking Out Of The (X)box, a presentation showing how computer games can be used as a stimulus for great creative, descriptive, transactional or journalistic writing. I’m now listening to the wonderful Wendy Adeniji, who was a hit at this year’s Scottish CILT/MFLE Communicate.08 conference.

Conte-moi is a website with a collection of stories written in French and their local language and accompanied with audio in both languages (where applicable) and a teacher’s lesson plan guide. Two of the stories have been animated as well. Stories are from Mali, Mauritania, Haiti, and Senegal.

Visit Conte-moi website