I would like to use this post to talk about the interaction we have had with Glasgow City Council’s Executive Director of Education, Maureen McKenna.
We were very lucky in this aspect, as Fraser was able to contact Mrs McKenna regarding the current practices in place, methods, difficulties and outcomes of modern language teaching in Glasgow. This way, we were able to gain an insight into the forms of education that are currently being practised.
Maureen was kind enough to send us documents and website links about the “1+2” strategy that is currently being implemented in Scottish schools.
This strategy is as thus:
“We will introduce a norm for language learning in schools based on the European Union 1 + 2 model - that is we will create the conditions in which every child will learn two languages in addition to their own mother tongue. This will be rolled out over two Parliaments, and will create a new model for language acquisition in Scotland.” (Scottish Government manifesto commitment, 2011)
From these documents, we were able to gather a wealth of information in order to aid us in forming our lesson plan. A lot of the information contained in the documents agreed with the points we had made so far. There is recognition of a need to introduce the learning of a foreign language earlier in the education system. The idea of “1+2” is for children to learn an additional two languages at the same time as learning their own native language.
We know that the younger children are, the more receptive they are to new things and new experiences, and have a greater ability to retain information. This is the foundation on which our project is built, and seeing the government’s plans for education in the future was extremely interesting for us and we are keen to see the results of this strategy’s implementation.
In the next blog entry I will include our proposed lesson plan as a result of the research we have carried out!
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