Archive | Languages

Primary schools in England will receive about £340 extra each next year to support compulsory languages teaching. This is made up from the £35 million that has been announced for 2008/09 to transform language teaching in primary schools. The money is earmarked for investment in specialist teachers, training and teaching resources as well as joint [...]

It isn’t often I spark off any debate on here, but I was interested in one of the responses to an earlier post, entitled ‘French of Spanish?’ that I made a while back.  This was of particular interest: When deciding which language to introduce, a primary school will consider these factors, among others: Which language [...]

Jim Porter has emailed me with an interesting comment based on Chris’ post about languages in primary school.  Here it is: When deciding which language to introduce, a primary school will consider these factors, among others: Which language do the teachers in the primary school have some knowledge of? Which language has the most teaching [...]

  For those that missed it yesterday the Sunday Mail is giving away 6 weeks of free language CDs over the next few weeks. They are produced by Linguaphone, which produces top-notch language courses. The courses will be part of their ‘All Talk’ series. If you want an introduction to a language, they might be [...]

Is French really the best language choice for pupils to be studying at primary school, and at secondary school, for that matter? In my opinion, the answer is a resounding ‘NO!’ for reasons I shall offer below. Before I begin my onslaught, I wish to point out that I have nothing whatsoever against France, the [...]

If you’re teaching your classes a foreign language, and you have a fair amount of awareness into how the foreign language works in terms of structure, in relation to English, I have an unusual technique to share with you that you might find of use. It’s called a ‘Diglot Weave’. ‘Di’ means ‘two’ and ‘glot’ [...]

By 2010, we will all have to offer a Modern Foreign Language to all of our Key Stage 2 pupils. Rather than seeing it as a ‘bolt-on’ initiative, it could be a great opportunity to develop other areas of the curriculum:- sending e-mails to an International Partner School setting up video-conferencing facilities development of speaking [...]

We knew it was coming to but today it was officially announced – Learning a foreign language will become a compulsory part of the curriculum for 7-14 year olds.  Alan Johnson said the Government would support making languages compulsory for primary schools when the primary National Curriculum is next reviewed, meaning at least seven years [...]

A few years ago, I listened to a course by a communication skills expert, and one of the principles I remembered about writing was the KISS principle. In case you haven’t heard of it before, KISS stands for “Keep It Simple, Stupid!” Over the course of my, now, many years of teaching languages to classes [...]