If you are a Language Teacher you could be receiving further training and support thanks to a new training program designed to assist foreign language teaching. A £1.8 million fund has been set aside in order to assist thousands of language teachers to improve their ability to teach according to Nicky Morgan, Education Secretary.
Schools throughout England will be provided with a more extensive languages curriculum that will make languages a compulsory course for students from 7 up to 11 years of age. These efforts will provide children with an edge when seeking jobs.
There had been a notable decline in the amount of students taking languages according to The English Baccalaureate and as far back as 2010 attempts had been made to try to reverse the decline. The new funding will go towards 9 projects involving over 2,000 primary and secondary schools and will span a two year period for areas that will include schools across England.
The new training will help create more challenging curriculums to improve the language skills of students and will cover writing, translation, grammar, spontaneous speaking and literary texts in foreign languages. Programmes selected had to have evidence that they would be teacher led with secondary and primary schools collaborating.
The Education Secretary said they want young people to have a better start and this would include learning a foreign language in order to “open up the world.” The new training will make it easier for young adults to further their studies abroad and then have the language skills to seek jobs globally. As well foreign languages and knowledge of other cultures has also become important to UK employers.
The programmes are not only for teachers but led by teachers and will help introduce languages as part of the compulsory curriculum which allows schools to teach the foreign languages of their choice. There will be a stronger focus on the important elements required to better learn and understand a language making it possible for students to become conversational in the language as well as reading and writing so they are completely immersed in the language.
As students’ progress and reach the secondary level they will learn more challenging conversation and also be able to translate. With the added study of texts, poems, etc. they will also have a better understanding of the culture.
The new programme will provide teachers with the tools they need to provide in depth language education to their students.
