Canada: What are your 'fringe' political ideas?

[Anthea Fraser Gupta]

I don't think the UK model for second-language teaching is the way to go for anyone..... Second language teaching, both foreign language teaching and community support teaching, has declined in quantity and quality in recent years. We can no longer require any skill in a language other than English from our incoming students.

I put my fringe ideas to the UK's Nufflield language inquiry (in ?1999) and was told they were too extreme to be published. These are my extreme ideas for the UK:

1. All children aged 5-11 to learn British Sign Language. [advantage of a sign language being a first second language -- no messing up with literacy; local community available to support learning; bringing communities together]

2. Promote the learning of languages used in the UK by children not from the community. [for example, allow and promote the teaching of Welsh in England, and encourage children from all communities to learn Urdu -- a the moment Welsh is taught in state schools only in Wales and the children who learn Urdu are children for whom is an ancestral or personal heritage language]. Link this with contact with communities where the languages are spoken.

Like everyone else consulted, I thought that children should be required to study English + another language until at least 16 -- preferably until 18. However, second language learning was reduced in UK a couple of years ago so that children are now only required to study a second language aged 11-14. They have an 'entitlement' to learn one before 11, but provision is patchy and their is no continuity to allow for development. Provision for continuity is one reason that education systems have to limit choice. It is discouraging to learn (say) Chineses at age 6-11 and then find it is not possible to continue with it at an appropriate level later.

Enough rant....

All over the world:

All schoolchildren to learn 3 languages. At least one will have to be a local dominant language (high motivation for learning this kind of language is the norm). Other languages are likely to be more successfully learnt if they are languages spoken by a reachable community so that the child can see the need for learning them There should be good provision at all levels for children to develop their heritage languages, especially where there are large communities associated with a language (it won't be practical to support communities that are numerically small).

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Anthea Fraser Gupta (Dr)
School of English, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT
<www.leeds.ac.uk/english/staff/afg>
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