The Scottish Funding Council is calling for a national debate on why and how we learn foreign languages after publishing a report into the supply and demand of modern language courses in colleges and universities.
Read more on this from Scottish Funding Council

The Scottish Funding Council (SFC) has just published its revised report on Modern Languages in Scotland: Supply and demand in post-school education.
Read more on the report on the Scottish CiLT news page
You can download the full report from the (SFC) website.

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

Those teaching languages to the 14-19 age group can now draw on a fantastic new resource launched by CILT, the National Centre for Languages. The new microsite, Reshaping Languages has been designed to respond closely to the recommendations in Lord Dearing’s 2007 Languages Review, as part of a move to promote innovative practice across a […]

The BBC reports that Cambridge University has dropped its requirement for applicants to have a language GCSE because too few pupils now take them.
Independent schools still tend to offer languages, despite them being no longer compulsory beyond the age of 14. However, only 17% of state primary schools offer them and less than half of […]

All pupils in Scotland should be given the chance to learn Chinese, a pioneer of teaching the subject has said.
Dr Judith McClure, headteacher of St George’s School in Edinburgh, which was among the first to offer the subject, said in the Scotsman that mastery of it was a key skill. Dr McClure, who is also […]

After an idle boast, language teacher Rick Jones will try to learn Vietnamese in three months, if a student works at his French.
Read his story on the Education Guardian website.

A stronger link between Scotland and China is the aim of a planned visit to the Far East by the education secretary, Fiona Hyslop, reports the Scotsman. News of the trip emerged as Ms Hyslop prepared today to meet Scottish students who will take part in Easter and summer schools in China.
Increasing numbers of schools […]

Ofsted marked yesterday’s International Mother Language Day with the release of a new report, Every Language Matters, evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of initial teacher training in languages other than French, German, Irish, Spanish and Welsh.
The education watchdog said that languages such as Arabic, Bengali and Mandarin should be given higher status in England’s schools […]

An influential group of experts is putting pressure on the Scottish Government to take urgent action to make Scotland more multilingual, the Herald reports.
Figures show that the number of school pupils taking modern language Highers has slumped by nearly 60% since the 1970s. The group has highlighted an ‘apartheid’ in foreign language study in Scottish […]