Education, Lifelong Learning and Culture Committee, 20 Feb 2008
Meeting date: Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Official Report
331KB pdf
Petition
PE1022 (Foreign Languages Policy)
The second item on the agenda is consideration of petition PE1022, on the promotion of foreign language learning and intercultural awareness in Scotland's schools, colleges and universities. The petition has been referred to us by the Public Petitions Committee.
As committee members will be aware, the Public Petitions Committee has already done quite a lot of work on the petition. Copies of the relevant correspondence have been included in the committee papers. Members will see that the cover note provides three possible options for how to proceed with our consideration of the petition. I ask members to comment on the petition.
I am happy to support option 3, because some important recommendations might come out of the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council's report on modern languages provision. I add a caveat to that: it is important to see languages in the context of the entire curriculum, and the more evidence we get on other subject areas the better.
I agree.
I also agree with option 3, which is that we keep the petition open until the publication of the funding council's report. We could also write to the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning in the meantime. I think that most committee members agree that we do not want to interfere—if that is the right word—in the curriculum directly.
Languages are in a vulnerable state in Scotland. We should take the opportunity to send out a strong message about the importance of learning languages in modern Scotland. We have worked to promote our own indigenous languages, and we have also talked about the importance of protecting classics in the curriculum. For the economy and culture of our country, and to be sure that we are an educated society, we must promote language learning.
I am not sure what the solution is, but I do not think that we want to return to compulsory language teaching, because that killed much interest in learning languages. I do not want to make too political a point, but one of Labour's commitments was to a supply-led measure for training more language teachers in Scotland.
When we write to the cabinet secretary we should ask how the Scottish Government intends to proceed. Being prescriptive on the curriculum is not the job of Government, but we should ask how the learning of modern languages can be promoted. The issue is too important for us to opt out of it. While we await the funding council's report, I do not want us to send out any message other than that language learning is of primary importance.
I concur. It is correct to discount the first option in our paper. Ken Macintosh makes a good point about ensuring that we couch our views in terms of recent announcements on the teaching of Scots and possibly Gaelic. We live in a country in which many languages other than the standard French and German are spoken. This is a good time to examine the situation, and a combination of options 2 and 3 would be a good way of doing that.
I am concerned, because the petition refers to "foreign language" policy in Scotland. From an educational point of view, people gain from being able to speak more than one language, no matter what their other languages are. Speaking a language opens doors that allow people to understand issues from different points of view, and people learn languages for lots of different reasons—for example, work, pleasure and travel.
The issue is so complicated that we should be careful about what we ask the cabinet secretary. As with many sectors of education, we need to provide more input, but I hope that we will do so after having worked out a philosophy that the Parliament can believe in.
We can learn from other countries. The ulpan system—based on a method first used in the teaching of Hebrew—is now used in many countries to help students gain fluency. The system is used in Wales for the teaching of Welsh, and I could mention many other countries. Gaels are now starting to use the system. However, our school classrooms are not using such a system. We really need to discover interesting ways of giving people a chance to acquire other languages.
The debate has to be skewed towards the approach that we adopt. Our letter to the cabinet secretary should mention the acquisition of various languages. Later, we can discuss how to proceed. If people are saying that everyone should learn the biggest language, then we should all be learning Chinese, but that is not the issue; the issue is about helping people to speak several languages and to use all the skills that learning languages can bring out. I am not talking about English. We should be doing Chinese from primary 1—although I do not think that we would agree about that.
The consensus appears to be that we should go with option 3 on our paper but that we should also write to the cabinet secretary beforehand.
Liz Smith made a valid point. Although we all agree on the importance of foreign language learning, we have to consider it in the wider context of the curriculum for excellence. I am sure that scientists and others could present similar arguments to those made in favour of foreign languages.
We will draft a letter to the cabinet secretary so that we can hear her initial comments. Further consideration of the curriculum for excellence will be in our future work programme.
Meeting closed at 13:21.