On 2 May, Teresa Tinsley, author of a British Academy report into languages, will be hosting a webinar on behalf of Rosetta Stone, one of Language Rich Europe’s sponsors. The webinar will look at issues such as the importance of language skills and possible solutions to help schools encourage language learning.
Who would benefit from attending?
If you are interested in attending, please register here.
Language Rich Europe is looking forward to being a panelist on tomorrow’s Guardian live chat - Is English still the dominant language of higher education?
Join the panel on the Guardian’s website on 15 February from 12-2pm GMT for a live chat on issues such as whether global higher education is being dominated by one language and what the implications of this might be on institutions.
The live chat is in partnership with ETS TOEFL and panelists include:
You can read more about Language Rich Europe’s research into languages in higher education institutions on our website:
Martin Dowle, Director British Council Ukraine, presented the language situation in Wales at last week’s Language Rich Europe launch in Kyiv. In this blog post, he summarises the approaches Wales is taking in order to promote Welsh and prevent its decline.
Is it inevitable that minority languages will always suffer decline? The case of Welsh shows this does not need to be the case. Since its low point in 1991, when just 18% of the Welsh population spoke Welsh, it has started to make a modest recovery. Today, 37% of 3 to 14 year-olds are able to speak Welsh, compared to just 15% in 1971, fuelling recovery from the cradle upwards.
Today, there are an estimated 611,000 Welsh speakers in Wales. Of these, 315,000 are native speakers, and the rest have competency, as a second language, to a greater or lesser degree.
Official figures suggest Wales loses between 1,200 and 2,200 native speakers every year. The number of communities – mostly rural — where 70% or more are native speakers continues to decline. But more people now speak (and are learning) Welsh as a second language in cities such as Cardiff than ever before.
In part this reflects a change in attitude to Welsh amongst non-Welsh speakers. Recent polling suggested 80% of Welsh people saw the language as something to be proud of. This is a far cry from the hostility that greeted the decision by the government in the early 1980s to set up a fourth TV channel solely in Welsh. Attitudes have changed, and this matters.
In 2000, the teaching of Welsh became compulsory in all schools up to the age of 16. The number of Welsh-medium schools is growing, as are measures to build the capacity of teachers to teach through the medium of Welsh.
But the Welsh government’s policy argues the school setting is not enough. Policy seems to me to focus on two areas.
First: the home. It encourages mothers and social carers, midwives, and nursery education to help develop the adoption of Welsh as a first language. If two parents speak Welsh, it’s estimated the chances the child will too are around 80%. If only one speaks Welsh, the chances are halved.
Second: the leisure activities of adolescents. The language is at risk if young people don’t see the benefit of speaking it, or think it’s cool to switch to English. So an effective language policy needs to consider youth culture, peer-group pressure, community attitudes, the global media and social networking. Providing enough cultural and social value to tip the balance in favour of Welsh is a big ask – but it’s essential to long-term survival. So policies really do need to focus on the language of ‘interaction’.
Read more about languages in Wales on the Language Rich Europe website and in our previous blog posts:
- Language Rich Europe Launch – Wales
- Can Google Speak Welsh?
- Speaking Welsh, Living in Brussels
Find out about our Language Rich Europe sponsors here. Rosetta Stone, one of our sponsors, reports on their recent schools venture:
“Located in Wimbledon, UK, Ursuline High School prepares its students for life in our global society. The school recognises the integral part languages play. Organised coinciding with the European Day of Languages, Ursuline held its annual language week from 24 to 28 September 2012 to celebrate different cultures, the enrichment language brings, and to educate students and the wider school community about the importance of learning languages.
In collaboration with Rosetta Stone with whom Ursuline has partnered to offer students a wider variety of languages and more diverse study options, the school held an assembly on 27 September to open the students’ eyes to the future potential language knowledge brings. Manja Klos, training expert at Rosetta Stone, addressed the students at the weekly assembly highlighting the importance of solid language skills not only to open up bigger and better opportunities in life both in terms of driving personal and professional development but, more importantly, to be able to get access to higher education and succeed in a globally competitive 21st century job market regardless of the career path they choose. With this, Manja also talked to the Rosetta Focus Group champions and engaged in brief motivational talks going into classes 9, 11 and 12 to set the Rosetta Stone challenge until Christmas 2012 at the end of which the top 3 performers will be able to win generous book vouchers made available by the school.
Melanie Guillet, Head of Modern Foreign Languages, is liaising with the Special Needs Department to extend the use of Rosetta Stone to students who have English as an Additional Language – so they can practise English, as well as to dyslexic students- the visuals in Rosetta Stone really help students memorise spellings in a different way. Melanie has also been working on making Rosetta Stone available to EAL parents who wanted to increase their own knowledge of English.
The champions are students that act as role models for others in recognising the importance of languages. The champions promote the language-learning tools to other students within the students and help them get set up with Rosetta Stone and can be approached for any support along the way.
At Rosetta Stone we feel Ursuline High School has raised the bar for driving language success among students and hope this story helps other schools to set up similar programmes.”
The European Parliament together with ALTE and University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations invites you to a series of events on Supporting multilingualism through language assessment.
You can find out more about it, including how to attend, on the European Commission’s website.
On 28 June 2012 Baroness Coussins attended the Language Rich Europe launch in the UK. Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Modern Languages Group, she also asked Her Majesty’s Government the following question about LRE in England:
what is their response to the research report published in June 2012 by the British Council-led Language Rich Europe consortium on its findings in England [HL1136]
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Hill of Oareford) responded:
We welcome this report and the valuable evidence it provides. Knowing a language benefits individuals and the economy more widely.
The Government is already taking steps to improve the take-up of languages in schools. We have announced that a language will be statutory for all seven to eleven year olds in maintained schools from 2014. A consultation will be launched shortly on what form this might take. Further, the English Baccalaureate has started to reverse the long-term decline of numbers taking languages at GCSE. We will be making an announcement on the secondary curriculum in due course.
You can read the Language Rich Europe profile for England on our website.
To help us kick off our project at the London School of Economics on 28 June we want to open up the debate and get ideas from across the twittersphere on one of our major topics of discussion and even invite our Twitter followers to attend!
If you are interested in taking part in person please email Kirsi Suutarinen or DM us @languagerich (https://twitter.com/#!/LanguageRich) to take part as soon as possible, space is very limited.
Everyone will be able to take part using our twitter hash tag, #LREUK, during the event to give thoughts and ask questions on the main topics of discussion:
The views of all those who respond will be shared with participants and panellists at the interactive workshop discussion happening 16:00h GMT on the 28th. We will have a screen showing tweets with #LREUK as they happen and we will be tweeting live from this discussion so you can follow along with debate and continue to send your views.
We welcome all who wish to take part so please spread the word and join us for this important event.
For more information on the event, please see our earlier blog post about it.
The text below (in Italian) discusses the question whether Italy is truly a multilingual country. This, and other interesting discussions took place during the launch of our project in Rome on 8 June 2012 and is written by Monica Barni, Professor in Didactics of modern languages, Università per Stranieri di Siena (University for foreigners in Siena) and Italian partner of Language Rich Europe project.
Si è svolto oggi a Roma presso la sede del Goethe Institut il lancio italiano del progetto Language Rich Europe. Al lancio hanno partecipato rappresentati delle Istituzioni, studiosi e molti studenti di lingue. Alla domanda posta dagli organizzatori: “l’Italia è davvero un paese multilingue?”, la risposta sì, l’Italia è un paese multilingue, ma privo della consapevolezza di tale identità e della consapevolezza dell’importanza degli lingue degli altri.
La ricerca ha messo in luce come la “questione delle lingue” in Italia non sia risolta, ma si evidenzi la tensione fra i poli del monolingui suo ricercato – l’italiano come lingua degli italiani – e il multilinguismo da sempre presente nella penisola, grazie alla presenza dei dialetti e delle lingue di antica minoranza, e rinnovato oggi dalle nuove, molte lingue portate dagli immigrati. E si vede rinnovato dalla politica linguistica europea, che vuole i cittdini del Vecchio Continente almeno trilingui per poter rispondere alle sfide del mondo globale, del mondo delle illimitate possibilita’ di contatto, di incontro, di scambio di persone, lingue e percio’ di culture, oltre che di merci. Gli italiani, e la politica linguistica italiana, non vedono le lingue degli altri, le apprendono poco, e le conoscono poco. A livello scolastico l’offerta di lingue è, in pratica, limitata alla sola lingua inglese – con l’unica eccezione delle scuole secondarie di I grado, ponendoci al di sotto della media europea; gli insegnanti non ricevono una formazione specifica per insegnare le lingue e non vengono incoraggiati a trascorrere periodi di studio nel Paese in cui si parla la lingua che insegnano. Tutti questi fattori sono inscindibilmente legati alla carenza di competenza nelle lingue straniere da parte degli italiani, come mettono in luce altre indagini svolte a livello europeo.
Da questa carenza di lingue straniere, di sensibilità e di attenzione verso le lingue degli altri derivano conseguenze negative per la capacita’ di internazionalizzazione del nostro sistema produttivo.
In case you have missed it, there’s an interesting new OECD publication which “examines the links between globalisation and the way we teach and learn languages”. You can preview the whole book online for free. Please see the abstract of the book below for more information.
“The rise of globalisation makes language competencies more valuable, both at individual and societal levels. This book examines the links between globalisation and the way we teach and learn languages. It begins by asking why some individuals are more successful than others at learning non-native languages, and why some education systems, or countries, are more successful than others at teaching languages.
The book comprises chapters by different authors on the subject of language learning. There are chapters on the role of motivation; the way that languages, cultures and identities are interconnected; the insights that neuroscience provides; migrants, their education and opportunities to learn languages; language learning and teaching in North America; and new approaches to language learning.”
Last week, Idske Bangma, research assistant at the Mercator European Research Centre on Multilingualism and Language Learning, gave a presentation about multilingualism in children’s everyday life at the ‘Dag van het jonge kid’ (Day of the young child). This presentation was partly based on the results of the EC-funded MELT project (Multilingual Early Language Transmission).
Below you can read the abridged version of Idske Bangma’s presentation, in Frisian, which appeared in the newspaper the Friesch Dagblad on April 23.
Meartaligens is in pre op dyn CV
Wy kinne net mear om meartaligens hinne. Ek it ûnderwiis kriget dat hieltyd better yn ‘e gaten.
De taal is te fine yn ferskillende farianten om ús hinne. De winkelstrjitten fan ‘e grutte stêden binne hieltyd Ingelsktaliger en ‘sale’ hat ‘uitverkoop’ hast hielendal ferdrongen. Kommersjeel is der foar it Frysk of in oare streektaal gjin romte, mar op oare terreinen binne der in protte foarbylden fan de lytse taal of it dialekt, foaral yn it deistige libben en de kultuer. Tink oan muzyk, teater, kabaret en oare kultuerútings yn it Frysk, Bildts, Grunnegs, of Stellingwarfs. Yn ‘e kranten komme streektalen, dialekten en minderheidstalen werom yn berte- en rou-advertinsjes en is it Ingelsk noch fier te sykjen. Taal is dan gjin kommersjeeel kommunikaasjemiddel, mar is relatearre oan gefoel, identiteit. Wat is it moai datst dy yn dyn memmetaal úterje kinst en by dyn eigen gefoel bliuwe meist. En datsto frij bist om dyn eigen taal rûnom te brûken.
For the full article, click here.
