[EDLING:22] EducationGuardian.co.uk: Teachers ask for language training guarantee

[fmhult at DOLPHIN.UPENN.EDU]

Francis Hult spotted this on the EducationGuardian.co.uk site and thought you should see it.

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Teachers ask for language training guarantee
Press Association
Thursday April 05 2007
The Guardian


The government's plans for every seven-year-old to learn a foreign language will founder if teachers are trained "on the cheap" in three weeks, a union warned today.

Members of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) condemned suggestions that staff would be given three weeks to learn a language before teaching it in primary classrooms.

The union said teachers should not be compelled to give lessons in French, Spanish or German if they have not mastered the languages themselves.

Last month, the education secretary, Alan Johnson, announced that all seven-year-olds in England would have to learn a language to encourage them to continue studying languages as teenagers.

His plan followed a dramatic decline in the numbers studying French and German at GCSE after ministers gave pupils the chance to drop languages in 2004.

Michael Catty, an ATL member from Hertfordshire, told the union's annual conference in Bournemouth that language education was in "meltdown" in state schools. Welcoming the plan to teach languages in primary schools, he said foreign languages were becoming the preserve of an elite.

But he warned: "As with any government initiative, there is a danger that it will be done on the cheap. I believe three weeks' training has been deemed adequate. It doesn't seem to be long enough."

Peter Shreeve, from Cowes high school on the Isle of Wight, said teachers needed training lasting 300 hours to become properly qualified in a language. "That sounds expensive to me," he said.

The conference backed a motion expressing concern that "primary school teachers should not be compelled to teach a foreign language without adequate appropriate training".

But the union's members stressed that they did not want to make languages compulsory again for all pupils until the age of 16.

A spokesman for the Department for Education and Skills said: "We are driving forward a renaissance in language teaching in schools, with £50m to be spent each year on delivering teacher training, language learning and engaging courses.

"In the past four years over 2,000 new primary teachers have been trained in languages, and a further 1,000 will be trained every year until the end of the decade."

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