David Wilson

Thanks, John, some very useful material here. I'm particularly interested in using MS Office applications in MFL teaching and learning, so the idea of drop down menus and fill-in fields facilitating writing tasks is a welcome example of a generic package being exploited to differentiate lesson delivery so that the needs of all learners are met. Three earlier issues of BECTa's ICT in Secondary Focus on Modern Foreign Languages are archived online: May 2005 http://www.ictadvice.org.uk/index.php?sect...subsectionid=75 February 2005 http://www.ictadvice.org.uk/index.php?sect...subsectionid=54 November 2004 http://www.ictadvice.org.uk/index.php?sect...subsectionid=15 The latest Focus also contains a reminder that the 2006 BETT Exhibition is coming up in January at its usual venue in London's Olympia. It's good to see that there's at least one MFL seminar on the Saturday when no teacher has to ask permission to attend. In the past, the Saturday seminars have never looked as tempting as the ones on the previous three days. David Wilson http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

Excellent contributions, Dan. I'm always pleased when I see Thinking Skills properly embedded in the core and foundation subjects of the National Curriculum rather than as a discrete entity which can so easily become a soon to be forgotten afterthought. I have created links to each of your school's departmental Thinking Skills projects from my subject-based Thinking Skills portal at http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/nc/thinking/ Keep up the good work! David Wilson http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

>I suppose what it comes down to is that we all want our governments to reflect our own personal beliefs.< Indeed, and not only the beliefs we hold at a particular stage of our lives but also the natural changes in our mindsets resulting from our experiences and from the fact that as we grow older, our priorities inevitably shift. My brother, who works in medical informatics in the American Upper Midwest and has amassed through his business a lot of expertise in actuarial matters, often says of older people at risk: "The forty-year-old didn't care enough about the eighty-year-old he would become", firmly attributing responsibility to the individual to plan for old age when mental or physical health might deteriorate to the point of incapacity. He is always trying to persuade me to move from the semi-detached dwelling where I have lived for thirty years to an appartment where others might "keep an eye on me" in case I suddenly collapse and my skeleton is only discovered years later because nobody has noticed I'm not around! I must admit I can't think that way - I take each day at a time - and I kind of trust in my national government to continue funding the National Health Service and local government social services to oversee my decline as I grow old, whether gracefully or disgracefully, after my savings run out! As a lifelong bachelor, I won't have children (or even nephews or nieces) to look after me when I can no longer do this for myself. A government that looks after the vulnerable very young or very old, yes, one could argue that these basic decencies are Christian values, but I like to think that they represent the kind of Christianity that Voltaire admired in the England of his time: a country with numerous Christian denominations rather than one dominant church such as Catholicism or Anglicanism. The latter may be the English "established" religion, but it's a broad umbrella covering many shades of spirituality, which makes tolerance a central platform of belief. When I look around the world, dominant, or quasi-dominant religious organisations seem to favour intolerance, e.g. the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, which was the architect of apartheid, or what some people call "islamofascism" in certain Middle East states. Of course, one could argue that the basic social security decencies that still exist in Britain are equally the historical contribution of the British labour movement which espoused the lot of common people who could not afford to buy their own education when they were young, to feed themselves when they were unemployed, to receive medical attention when they were ill or to save enough to finance a comfortable old age. But let's not forget that many of the members of that movement were inspired by Quakerism and Methodism as much as they were by Marx and Lenin. David Wilson

In my family, the pursuit of education was paramount. My maternal grandfather had been prevented by his own father from continuing his grammar school education and was determined that his own children would go as far as they could academically. After university studies, my uncle became a deputy director of education for Glasgow while my aunt worked all her life as a secondary school teacher. My mother opted instead of higher education for the civil service, passing the entrance exams with distinction. She brought a reverence (not a word chosen lightly) for education to our upbringing, my brother’s and mine. She also inherited her father’s politics, which favoured voting Conservative locally - the party had a better reputation then for balancing the books in local government - but Labour nationally, because they wanted strong public services. My own political views - not “ideology” or “philosophy” which is too grand a term because it implies some consistent and coherent system of belief and commitment- germinated during my sixth form and university years. I suspect most people’s politics are shaped by the way they thought in their late teens and early twenties. I did English Literature twice at A-level, the first time reading Jane Austen and Henry James, both authors I then loathed because their characters seemed to be effete navel-gazers who never worked a day in their lives and never wanted for anything. The second time round, I got to read D. H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers”, which I adored because I could relate to the characters in the novel. At my 1960s direct-grant boys’ grammar school, I was also beginning to notice that life wasn’t fair. The school gave the impression at sixth form level that the boys they were interested in were those likely to get Oxbridge scholarships. I wasn’t interested in going to either Oxford or Cambridge - I’d been to a sixth form language conference where the French lecturer from Manchester University was light-years ahead of the ancient and fossilised Oxbridge don when it came to charisma and teaching skills! I moved on to the University of Leeds in 1966, an era of political and social upheaval both in the UK and in Europe. There were demos about the raising of foreign student fees and sit-ins about what was kept in student files. Professor Thody, the head of the French department made a point of calling a meeting of his students to explain that our files contained little more than a record of marks and exam results, not details of our political convictions or activities. My summer semester 1968 at the University of Tübingen in southern Germany was memorable largely because of the frequent direct action of the students and the news of what was happening at that time in France - barricades in the streets defended by Daniel Cohn-Bendit and his followers against the riot police. My English Language Assistantship during the 1998-9 academic year at an Auvergne secondary school began late and I remember the Communist teachers in the school jumping for joy when they heard about De Gaulle’s resignation from the presidency. When I returned to Leeds, Jack Straw was Union President. So events and personalities of the time certainly conspired to drive my already leftwing views further leftwards. It was an exciting time politically. When I did an M.Ed by research during the 1970s, I chose to do my thesis on East German language teaching. This was partly because I was a German teacher with little knowledge of the GDR, but it was also because I was interested in East Germany’s experiment with the organisation of education. For instance, learning a trade became compulsory for everybody. There was a kind of social justice in forcing a child intent on, say, becoming a lawyer, to train as a plumber as well. It would have been an instant cure for the arrogance I had seen at my 1960s grammar school among some of the sons of lawyers intent on following in Daddy’s footsteps! I got to visit the GDR, like Graham did, travelling around the country on my own, and my disillusionment with the workers’ paradise began to set in! During the later 70s, and the 80s, 90s and the current decade I’ve retained comfortable left of centre views which have kept me firmly as a teacher in the maintained sector. I’ve never been tempted to teach in an independent school, even though people assure me that nowadays anybody displaying arrogance in such places is instantly slapped down and that wealth no longer buys privileges there. I guess my politics are, and always will be, intertwined with my educational values. Like most teachers, I strongly believe in a society where the best get to the top solely by their own efforts and through equality of educational opportunity, not by accident of birth or through strings being pulled by relatives and friends. The secondary school Special Needs department where I work is called the “Equal Opportunities” department. I like to think the name came from, or was influenced by, one of John F. Kennedy’s axioms, “All of us do not have equal talent, but all of us should have an equal opportunity to develop our talents” because it encapsulates what I believe politically and educationally. David Wilson http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

I haven't heard of it either. I Googled the term with the "pages from the UK" setting and much of the stuff I got appears to relate to higher education in general and medical curricula in particular.

The problem with the new term "e-learning" is that teachers will inevitably think of "email", an older and much more familiar e-term, and therefore assume online learning is meant. I'm not sure what's wrong with "ICT-based learning" except that it has more letters. It's true that in the early days of microcomputing the students knew more than the teachers. Back in the early 1980s, a student sat down and showed me how to write a computer program in BASIC that could conjugate French verbs! Some students still have phenomenal ICT knowledge, but I'm not entirely persuaded it's always the kind we teachers would find useful in the classroom. I see too many students daily hammering away at the space bar to centre titles in Word or messing about with fancy, illegible fonts and WordArt instead of exploiting the power of a modern word processing package to channel thought into structured writing. I also think that teachers are much more wised up about ICT in the new millennium than they were in the 1980s when microcomputers first entered schools. Yes, they still have a lot to learn about appropriate strategies for using ICT to teach their subjects, but physical access to ICT facilities seems to me to be the persistent major problem for those who want their students to work at their own individual computers rather than just share a whole-class resource such as a data projector or an interactive whiteboard. David Wilson http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

John drew our attention a month ago to certain new History and Geography documents on the ICT Advice site. It's been over two months since we've had a contribution to the MFL section, so I thought I'd list the equivalent publications for MFL on the site. ICT in Secondary Magazine May 2005 issue: Focus on Modern Foreign Languages. "In this issue we Focus on... school exchange ideas, consider issues relating to the teaching of languages to students with learning difficulties, and bring news of some useful resources and events. " http://www.ictadvice.org.uk/index.php?sect...bcba90316aa71a1 Ask an Expert: Exploiting ICT-based authentic materials for MFL http://www.ictadvice.org.uk/index.php?section=ae&theme=80 What is text chat in MFL? http://www.ictadvice.org.uk/index.php?sect...sub_09&rid=8876 Enhanced word processing options for language teaching http://www.ictadvice.org.uk/index.php?sect...4&rid=8628&wn=1 Hope the above is of interest. David Wilson http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

Only institutions can be stakeholders, apparently, never individuals. I agree about the omissions - why only five subject associations listed (2 out of 3 core subjects, 3 out of 9 foundation subjects), when the National Curriculum comprises a dozen subjects? Isn't at least one MFL organisation desirable - we've been using ICT to teach languages since 1961!

According to 2002-2004 data, there is a wide variation in educational inclusion across England: http://inclusion.uwe.ac.uk/csie/segregationstats2005.htm Quality of support matters more to learners with disabilities than the issue of mainstream and special school placements: http://www.drc.org.uk/uploaded_files/docum...arch_June05.doc David Wilson http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

There's a "Guardian" article about Kesgrave High School's decision to ban skirts at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,...1243477,00.html This year, in my maintained mixed 11-16 secondary school, the girls have the choice of wearing skirts or trousers. As it happens, every single one of them has opted for trousers. David Wilson http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com

Further to Graham's message about accessibility issues: The Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 and the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act of 2001 cover school websites and oblige schools "to make reasonable adjustments to ensure that people who are disabled are not put at a substantial disadvantage compared to people who are not disabled." The World Wide Web Consortium's website accessibility guidelines can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/ Sheffield City Council has posted guidance about school website accessibility and the law at http://www.sheffield.gov.uk/EasySite/lib/s...5816&pgid=20486 "Taking a pragmatic view," this document reassures us, "so long as a governing body has taken 'reasonable adjustments' to make their school site accessible there is little likelihood of successful litigation". Martin Sloan's PowerPoint presentation "Web accessibility in education: SEN and Disability act 2001" at http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/pages/websites/s...loan/slides.ppt is also of interest. On the general matter of website design, I find Robin Williams and John Tollett's "The Non-Designer's Web Book" (Peachpit Press) an excellent publication for the lay person. It's a companion volume to Robin Williams' equally readable and unpatronising book "The Non-Designer's Design Book". David Wilson http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

Indeed. "The Blueberry Story" at http://www.jamievollmer.com/blue_story.html testifies to the difference between private industry and public education. David Wilson http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

The ubiquity of English can lead to a sense of superiority among native speakers of the language when they encounter those who speak it as a second language. During the summer of 2000 I presented a paper at a computer-assisted language learning conference in Kobe, Japan. One of the people chairing my session was a professor at an Ivy League university in the States. I saw her again at one of the sessions where an Asian speaker was doing a CALL presentation. The Ivy League professor recognised me and took me to one side to say how awful she thought the presenter's English was. I pointed out to her that the presenter was lecturing about a complex subject in a language other than his own, something that I wouldn't do lightly even in my own teaching languages, French and German. She wasn't pleased with this observation and feigned surprise when I was selected to give a toast at the conference dinner and began my speech by saying and explaining the immortal words "Howway the lads", the Newcastle football chant, which Jim Callaghan taught President Jimmy Carter to say when he visited Tyneside. She also stood with her back to the Kabuki show put on by the wife of an American university teacher who worked in Japan. What a narrow vision some English speakers have of the world beyond their shores! There's none so blind as those who will not see... I agree with Graham about the affinity between the British and the Japanese. We are both island peoples and share many common perspectives. When I was in Kobe and Kyoto, I did see instances of what we Europeans would probably call "exotic", such as the wooden temples of Kobe and Kyoto and the geisha haunts of Gion. But I also saw a people with incredible technological expertise, as exemplified by their bridges and causeways and their ability to achieve an enviable quality of life in a country with a huge population crowded into coastal areas. I also loved what I regard as their poetic use of, not their errors in, the English language: "Happy soon" said the poster outside my hotel on Rokko Island, off the coast at Kobe. David Wilson http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

It depends what I want to do with the foreign language. Putting to one side my work as a German teacher, the most important skill for me as a foreign language user is reading. I do a lot of web-based research about foreign language learners with special educational needs. Using my "intercomprehension" skills, I can follow a text about languages and special needs in languages as diverse as Dutch and Spanish. Do I want to learn how to speak these languages? No, unless I have a sudden desire or need to visit a country where they are spoken. I don't have time, or the inclination to develop an "acceptable" level of proficiency in all four communication skills in a whole range of languages: reading suffices for what I want to do at the moment. Now, I mentioned my work as a German teacher. In this context, I have to maintain a proficiency in all four skills so that I can impart my subject knowledge to my students who will sit GCSE in a year's time. They will be tested in all four skills for a nationally recognised qualification, so there are fewer opportunities to specialise in a particular skill as I have done as a foreign language user outside the classroom. The Languages Ladder, as I understand it in the UK, has built-in flexibility. One of its aims is: "enable each of the four skills – listening, speaking, reading and writing, to be assessed discretely". So students with mother tongues other than English but unable to read or write those mother tongues, can be given credit for what they can do. Read about the languages ladder in a recent booklet downloadable from: http://www.dfes.gov.uk/languages/uploads/L...s%20Booklet.pdf Oh, and Chomsky. Some people write inclusive books that are a lifelong source of inspiration and enlightenment about language. Others revel in exclusivity, making the phenomenon of language and communication even more complicated than it already is. I'll leave you to speculate in what category I place Noam. David Wilson http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

Steve: I certainly don't feel insulted by what you've written. Honesty is never insulting. I've never advocated in favour of full inclusion for those with special educational needs and I don't intend to do so here. My local education authority still has special schools full of dedicated teachers and pupils who are rightfully there, receiving their educational entitlement. At the same time, those who can benefit from a mainstream education are given the opportunity to remain in mainstream where most of them flourish. Those who don't are quickly moved on to special education, where the provision suits them better. I'm arguing for flexibility, consultation, collaboration and follow-through, all in the best interests of the child. Which brings me to your own predicament. Judging from what you've written, you've been badly let down by the system, or more accurately, by the "gatekeepers" who operate the system within your locality. SEN provision only works when all the stakeholders cooperate in the best interests of the child. You certainly know what's wrong. Are you able to make a list of what it would take to put matters right? Show the professionals your list - be reasonable, don't ask for the stars, but map out what you consider your nephew's needs to be, and what provisions would match those needs. Having written your list, challenge the professionals to write down how they perceive your nephew's needs and matching provisions. If you come to an agreement, then make sure what has been agreed is written down, with dates: "by such and such a date, this will have happened". This is how schools meet their targets; if they don't, they're accountable. Get as many allies as you can. Have you followed up my suggestion about the LEA's parent-partnership service? Have you joined your local branch of the National Autistic Society for support? You shouldn't feel alone in all this. On the matter of autism, I agree with you that the current state of knowledge in educational circles is low. I've been to conferences too about ASD and have left very unimpressed by so-called autism experts whose only message is "all you have to do is put up with the child's funny little ways". I've done lots of web searches and ASD seems to be treated more often than not as a medical issue. There's a lot of anger out there, parents complaining about what's gone wrong with their child's education. You're right too about teachers being untrained how to include those with ASD. I've argued long and hard with autism experts who think it's adequate just to give a few shallow, generalised pointers to educators. No wonder many teachers feel helpless. I hope your nephew eventually receives an education appropriate to his needs. No, I'm not going to say that such an education should take place within a mainstream school. If a special school placement is forthcoming and meets his needs, I for one would be delighted. David Wilson http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

The following web page offers a possible solution: http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000646.htm I found it by Googling with the filename. Looks like it's not an uncommon problem, which doesn't mean it's easily solved. Hope this helps. David Wilson http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

I've been approached by a project dedicated to the promotion of foreign language learning by people with special educational needs. They want to link a group of 16-18 year olds in a British special school with a similar group in France for the purpose of exchanging photos, cards etc, but they have been unsuccessful so far in identifying anybody interested on the French side. Any suggestions? I've scoured the Web, but have come up with very little. David Wilson http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

Graham was making the point that a well-defined need (the ability to communicate in basic Polish, necessary for a short professional visit to the country) can lead to an appropriate and effective learning solution (a CD-ROM, easily and conveniently accessed at home). When we match well-defined problems with concrete, tried and tested solutions, it's a win-win situation. This is exactly my conviction too and I've made this point over and over again in this thread. Define the real-world (in our case learning) problem first. Then, and only then, proceed to potential solutions. Don't let the technicians or the information technologists rush us into a digital solution. After all, they have their own problem to solve. They've invented something that looks "cool", but they need investment to develop it. They need customers. And, as the showman P. T. Barnum says: "There's one born every minute". Many of us are blinded by the shiny new packaging. I'm no technophobe - I've owned a computer since 1983 - but I've learnt the hard way to find out about the limitations as well as the benefits of new technology. We have to know about the latter as well as the former if we are to make reasoned judgements about what we do know about: our day to day work as teachers in the classoom. That is what we should start with when we are deciding what resources, digital or otherwise, will support the teaching and learning. Leave the grand(iose) educational ICT plans to the science fiction writers. Isn't this what we should be discussing, Daniel, rather than the "big-picture", or "blue-skies thinking" or the "visionary thing", which so often turns out to be vacuous and wasteful of that all too scarce commodity, time? David Wilson http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

This is so true and certainly it's the reason why I share the materials I have produced. Most of what I post on my website these days is there because a weary colleague has made a weekend plea on an online forum for some resources to support a particular topic in a lesson on Monday morning. I have to say, though, that on the few occasions when I get a message of thanks afterwards, it's usually from somebody else on the forum in question. It's sad, but people don't always value what they get for free. Maybe I'm cynical, but I sometimes believe that efforts would be acknowledged more if a nominal charge were made. I'm not contemplating doing so, however, because I do believe in giving something back to the teaching profession. I'm human too, though, and if individuals keep on asking for help without even a thank-you in return, I become increasingly tempted to ignore them. I haven't done so yet because I believe their students would suffer if I did. However, if I have to do a lot of work when I answer a cry for help, I will sometimes release a tidbit of what I've found out, promising more if a response is forthcoming. When the magic word "thank you" appears, the rest of the information is sent. Does all that sound petty? I just feel that there should always be some reward for sharing what we have, if just an expression of gratitude to keep us doing what we do. Otherwise our generosity is undervalued. Our students deserve daily (hourly?) boosts to their self-esteem. We do too. David Wilson http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

I accept your arguments about the spread of English, Javier, but I'm not entirely convinced that an "international English language" actually exists. Some linguists talk about "Englishes" or "varieties of English". The term "international English language" seems to imply that a standard English language exists worldwide, independent of the countries where the language is traditionally spoken. We all know that British English and American English have differences in spelling (humor/humour) and vocabulary (sidewalk/pavement). Some of the transatlantic differences are so great that we are truly "divided by a common language". So which of the two is the international standard? What tends to happen at academic conferences is that a decision is made in advance which of these norms should apply when submitting papers. When I presented in Kobe, Japan, I was asked to write my paper using American English. I was happy to oblige, but that doesn't mean I will then use American English when I teach my special educational needs students at my English school. They learn British spelling and usage. And if we talk of English as the language of Europe, just what does that mean in practice? Latin was once "the language of Europe", but that meant it was the language of theology, philosophy, science, the lingua franca of a scholarly élite, not the language of the common man. I hope that the vernaculars of Europe, from Albanian to Welsh, will long continue to be spoken on the streets of our continent, testifying to our rich cultural and linguistic diversity. I also hope that the adoption of a form of English as a language of international communication won't discourage "native" Anglophones from studying other major languages such as French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Chinese and Japanese. Is there an "international Spanish language"? I'm not a Hispanist, but I have heard that there are significant differences between Castilian and the various manifestations of Latin American Spanish. David Wilson http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

How did you get round the language divide, Anne? If you used English as the medium, did the Scandinavian students with SEN respond directly in English, or were their responses rendered into English by their teachers? I believe there's also a lot to be gained by teachers in different European countries sharing their knowledge and experience with SEN across national borders. Because I know German, I am able to tap into what working parties of SEN teachers in German-speaking Europe are doing. There's a lot of interesting and innovative practice in German-language reports online which deserves to brought to the attention of the English-speaking world. David Wilson http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

My naturalised American brother tells me wonderful tales about his two visits to Australia (Queensland and New South Wales) and he ponders wistfully how things might have been had we taken the £10 passage "down under" during the 1950s. I'm simply reporting how I see things in my neck of the woods - the local councillors and adminstrators are the ones who decided that SEN should be a priority, and fortunately central government sees it that way too. Yes, it's vital to have a supportive parent population campaigning for the retention of special schools for the minority who require them. Inclusion is a worthy aim, particularly when the concept extends beyond education to society at large. It mustn't be done just for the sake of saving money. It must be done with support and expertise built in for those who will benefit. No vulnerable child should be left to suffer as the result of well-intentioned but dogmatic policy-making. David Wilson http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

It may be a matter of "carrot and stick". Many teachers, including me, have attended courses on a Saturday and come away brimming with enthusiasm and detemined to put the new ideas into practice on Monday morning. Come Monday morning, events thwart our best intentions. The ICT room is booked up, the data projector in the room doesn't work because the last person in has pulled all the cables out of the back of the computer or set everything to Video when you want RGB to show a presentation. Or suddenly a test appears on the horizon and teacher and class have to buckle down to some last-minute revision and the whiteboard marker is the easiest tool under the circumstances. Get the school's culture right first. In my school, we register our classes via the computer. We post our assessments on our intranet. We write our reports using report software. Every classroom has a data projector and staff are expected to use it, if for nothing else than displaying the lesson objectives. Our lessons are observed by a senior member of staff once a year and if we don't use the technology, we would be asked why. Each teacher has a remote control for the projector. The school network has a bank of commercial presentations, in our case Boardworks, which provides me with instant native-speaker German speech, a merciful release from bygone days of winding and rewinding the wretched cassette recorder while the the class "hangs from the chandeliers" and the head teacher stares in disbelief through the window. Showing how technology can SIMPLIFY normal teaching is the key - that and not stinting on ICT training during staff in-service days. Oh yes, and technicians available immediately when we can't get the technology to work. Fortunately my school has all this. It's a well-equipped technology college. Because the school invests in the proper equipment for our school use, most teachers invest, out of their own pocket, in their own computers at home and spend hours on them preparing computer-based lessons. It's the absolute minimum for getting staff started on ICT. If the school's not prepared to fund and encourage all this, what's the motivation for teachers to change? We need both top-down (senior management!) and bottom-up (innovative classroom teachers!) measures to get ICT adopted as the teaching & learning norm. David Wilson http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

Ruth Kelly, the UK Secretary of State for Education and Skills, has just announced that £115 million pounds are due to be invested in modern foreign language learning. The bulk of the money will go to the primary sector to fund an earlier start in foreign language learning: 6000 teachers will need to be recruited. There will also be money for the Languages Ladder, which brings flexibility and structure into MFL accreditation, for language colleges who collaborate with primary schools, and for international school twinning and teacher exchanges. The following links tell the story and initial reactions to it. Department for Education and Skills http://www.dfes.gov.uk/pns/DisplayPN.cgi?pn_id=2005_0034 The funding also has a mention on their Languages Website at http://www.dfes.gov.uk/languages/ where there's a link to a 6-page leaflet about the "boost to languages" at: http://www.dfes.gov.uk/languages/uploads/6page_leaflet.pdf The link isn't functioning yet. BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4339591.stm Times Educational Supplement http://www.tes.co.uk/2078522 Education Guardian http://education.guardian.co.uk/primaryedu...1435233,00.html It's also on the front page of this week's Times Educational Supplement: "Language aid unveiled". The funding is the subject of a thread on the UK language teachers' forum Linguanet ("the Govt's millions"). See the message archives at: http://www.mailbase.org.uk/lists/linguanet...um/archive.html Curiously enough, it hasn't had a mention yet on ELL (Early Language Learning Forum), archived at: http://www.mailbase.org.uk/lists/ell-forum/archive.html Maybe that will change over the weekend, or perhaps the primary sector knew about this funding in advance! Do you think the primary school foreign language learning initiative will succeed this time? The Nuffield Schools Modern Languages Project of the 1960s and 1970s was very successful for a while, lauded by teachers and students, when it ran in a number of primary schools in England and Wales and continuation courses were provided in their feeder secondary schools. Does primary school foreign language learning fully compensate for the reduction of the status of modern foreign languages in key stage 4 (14- to 16-year-olds) from compulsory to voluntary subjects, resulting in many students abandoning MFL study at age 14? What are the reactions of colleagues working in other countries? Is primary school foreign language learning effective there? Is it provided universally? How successful do secondary school MFL teachers think the primary school initiative is when they receive students who have completed that element of the MFL course? Thoughts, anyone? David Wilson http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/

Call me old-fashioned, but I still believe that innovation and quality in teaching are the responsibility of the teacher and not the software. Was a proper needs analysis done to determine whether there was a demand for such pronunciation tools? Did the developers take the trouble to produce a suite of model lessons exemplifying how the programs might be integrated into existing schemes of work and into classroom practice? Did they consult teachers and ask them to pilot their programs with real classes? If so, did they listen to, and act upon, the feedback they received? Did the evaluators make a subjective judgement when they turned down the developers' proposals, or were they acting in accordance with a transparent list of criteria agreed nationally by policy-makers and classroom practitioners? Is there a consensus when it comes to defining "higher quality teaching" or is this notion simply in the eye of the beholder? David Wilson http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/