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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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’Â
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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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