Part 1 personal writing in French 100 -150 words
Part 2 essay in English on background, history, rationale and current situation for MLPS
Part 3 short lessons presentation - micro teaching
All of this to be done around Easter. Essay could be later as long as I have time to mark it before the June diet.
We started to think about the rationale and history of MLPS in Scotland and identified the big questions
What do we teach? Who is best suited to teach ML in PS? What age/stage is the best to start learning a second language? Why is it mainly French? What about continuity into secondary? What about assessment? What is driving all this?
We didn't get the answers to all of this, by the way!
We discussed our experiences as learners of a language at primary (and secondary)
We started to find out about the government policies that dictate what we do in school.
The MLPS programme was launched with a Circular from the Secretary of State for Scotland in 1989. A pilot programme of 6 cluster groups in the first year with secondary specialists demonstrating the teaching. Another 6 joined in the following year. The languages taught (French, German, Spanish, Italian) were decided in cluster groups with the proviso being the pupils could continue the same language in secondary. At this time there was no commercial material available. Meanwhile a training programme was being devised which was launched in 1993. This consisted of a 27 day course usually run from October - October for 1 day a week. This was directly funded by the government. Cover was provided to allow teachers out of school. The initial aim was to have 1 primary teacher per school trained who would go back to school and teach the ML. This programme ran for 10 years! Teachers learned by doing the activities; games, stories, craft.
The original ML 5-14 guidelines were published in 1990 but were more for secondary. Advice to schools and topic frameworks went out to primary schools in 1997 to give more guidanc as to what to teach in primary. Next big thing - The Citizens of a Multilingual World Report 2000 also know as the Mulgrew Report which still influences us today.
to be continued!
Hope to get you enrolled on the university blackboard site as soon as possible and will provide links to online documents and references and other papers
We spent some time on classroom objects and classroom commands.
Homework for next week is to come up with a simple activity to teach/practise classroom objects and present it to the group. Do not spend hours on this! Keep it simple!
Bon courage!
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