When the rule becomes the exception...

It was really cold in my flat this morning, so I grabbed a pile of essays to mark and headed for the university, and reliable central heating.  Well, in the end I didn't make it into the uni, stopping outside to enjoy wome truly incredible weather.

One thing that I've noticed time and again is that adjective-noun word order seems pretty difficult for French people, with many only being able to cope with "plain" adjectives.  Stick in an adjective formed from a past or present participle and they revert to the French order. (eg "land unoccupied" instead of "unoccupied land".)

Now at first I thought this may be a verb/adjective confusion, but I'm starting to think otherwise.

In theory, students should learn with normal adjectives as a base case and then generalise from there.  However it looks as though they haven't actually generalised it - I believe a great many of my students have, at some point earlier in their schooling, internalised what to me is the "rule" as though it's an exception.

What could cause this problem?  An overly restrictive set of adjectives at the start, probably.

It isn't difficult to introduce -ed and -ing adjectives early on -- "tired dogs" and "boring books" and the like -- but that has to be expanded upon, and opened up to the rarer participial adjectives.  Yes, rarer adjectives.  Even though these words aren't in the Swadesh lists or similar, that doesn't matter.  They're rare, and they're regular, and these two facts are intrinsically linked.

In most languages, the most common words are irregular, so it's no great leap of logic to see how a learner could falsely assume the rule is an exception if they're only dealing with a small set of common words....

Edit: I feel a funny sense of déjà vu....

New evidence of in-utero language development.

A step away from the education side of things now, and back towards language.

I just saw an intriguing article on the BBC News website, reporting on a paper recently published by a French research team.  It's long been believed that babies start to learn to discriminate sounds while in the womb, given that the ear is fully developed by 23 weeks.  Babies ability to discrimate sounds can only be measured by brain scans (because you can't ask them if they can here the difference) but you can't do a scan while the baby is still in the womb (cos you've got to stick a wee cap on their heads.  So the researchers took premature newborns and carried out the usual tests for phoneme discrimination, and they found something.  Not a lot, but it definitely supports the claims that language learning starts before birth.

What do we learn when we learn by doing?

The University of Georgia MOOC on online education was starting to look very interesting before it suddenly folded. On one hand, it covered a lot of interesting theoretical pedagogy. On the other, the practical pedagogy of the course itself seemed sub-optimal. As I only got one week in before they closed up, so I can't really say all that much about it.

One academic the course has introduced me to is Roger C. Schank. Roger is an AI lecturer who later specialising in learning. Schank's big idea is that of learning by doing. It's a simple and compelling idea – he claims traditional classrooms don't work because they are far too theoretical and divorced from any real “need” to learn.

There is certainly a lot of truth in this. A book of drills (whether it be arithmetic, grammar, or rote historical facts) does little to demonstrate either why the information is important or the contexts to which it is relevant.

The title of this post is lifted straight from a report Schank wrote in 1995 for his university. It's a huge piece of writing – almost thirty thousand words long – and to be perfectly honest with you, I didn't read it to the end. But why would I? It's called a “technical report”, but in truth it's little more than an oversized opinion piece. There's no technical data: he does not appeal to research, he does not appeal to figures, he just makes unsupported statements. What is most telling is that there are only 5 citations in his bibliography, and four of these are to himself.

As he argues without evidence, I feel perfectly entitled to dismantle his argument without citations. Besides, he's supposed to be an academic, and I'm just a blogger!

First up, Schank fails to address in the first 25% of his essay (which is approximately what I read) the biggest concern that has always been raised against the idea of whole-subject-learning, learn-by-doing or whatever label you chose to attach to the idea: lack of breadth. (A quick skim suggests that that it's not addressed further down, so if it is, it's clearly not given the prominence it deserves. Besides, as it is the single most important concern of most critics, you need to address it early or you lose our attention.) A single task will only lead to a single solution, with some limited exploration of alternative strategies. It teaches the students how to cope with a situation where they lack knowledge, rather than minimising those situations by providing them with knowledge.

There's been research into various aspects of this. I've seen reports claiming to prove schoolchildren given a whole-subject education have a much narrower set of knowledge. This should be pretty obvious, I would have thought... so maybe I'm just displaying confirmation bias and reading the stuff that supports my view.

Of course, there was the study that showed that doctors trained by case-study rather than theory performed better in diagnosing patients, but as I recall it, this was tempered by the fact that their diagnoses took a lot of time and money, because they tended to follow a systematic approach of testing for increasingly less common problems or symptoms. A doctor trained on a theory-based course was more likely to formulate a reasonable first hypothesis and start the testing process somewhere in the middle. The conclusions we can take from this are mixed. You can claim that the traditionally-trained doctor is better at diagnosing on the grounds that he can do it with less testing; or you can claim that only the end result matters, and the case-study-trained doctor is better. You can argue that minimising mistakes is the ultimate goal, or you can argue that the time taken in avoiding mistakes is too great in that it delays treatment for other patients.

So, anyway... Schank does nothing to convince me that it is possible to cover the breadth of a traditional course in learn-by-doing, but there is a video on Schank's site of a course he designed at Carnegie-Mellon about ten years ago, and it alludes to what I think is the only real argument about it. One of the senior course staff and one or two of the students talk about the idea of forgetting everything that's been taught in a traditional course. If challenged, would that be the basis of Schank's response? The logic certainly appeals: if you're not really learning anything in a traditional academic course, the breadth of what is covered is irrelevant.

But is anything ever truly forgotten? I've recently gone back into coding after a long hiatus – even when I worked in IT, I never had any serious programming to do. But when I come up against a problem, I find myself thinking back to mostly-forgotten bits of theory from my CS degree days, and looking them up on the net. Tree-traversal algorithms, curried functions, delayed evaluation... But if I had never encountered these ideas before, how would I even know to look for them?

This is not a mere theoretical problem. I'm not usually one to complain about “ivory tower academics”, but goddamn it, Schank's brought this on himself. And I quote:

"One of the places where real life learning takes place is in the workplace, "on the job." The reason for this seems simple enough. Humans are natural learners. They learn from everything they do. When they watch television, they learn about the day's events. When they take a trip, they learn about how to get where they are going and what it is like to be there. This constant learning also takes place as one works. If you want an employee to learn his job, then, it stands to reason that the best way is to simply let him do his job. Motivation is not a problem in such situations since employees know that if they don't learn to do their job well, they won't keep it for long.

Most employees are interested in learning to their jobs better. One reason for this is, of course, potential monetary rewards. But the real reason is much deeper than that. If you do something often enough, you get better at it -- simple and obvious. When people really care about what they are doing, they may even learn how to do their jobs better than anyone had hoped. They themselves wonder how to improve their own performance. They innovate. Since mistakes are often quite jarring to someone who cares about what they are doing, people naturally work hard to avoid them. No one likes to fail. It is basic to human nature to try to do better and this means attempting to explain one's failures well enough so that they can be remedied. This self-correcting behavior can only take place when one has been made aware of one's mistakes and when one cares enough to improve. If an employee understands and believes that an error has been made, he will work hard to correct it, and will want to be trained to do better, if proper rewards are in place for a job well done. "

Many graduates, particularly CS grads, will immediately be able to identify with me when I say this isn't true. When you leave university, you typically know how to do things correctly, but once you get into the real world, “correctly” is too time-consuming, too expensive. (Except in safety-critical roles, such as avionics or military systems.) In the short term, this is OK – pragmatically, that's the way it's got to be.

In the longer term, though, things start to go haywire. We get so habituated to our way of doing things that we soon learn to identify it as the “right way” of doing things. Someone comes along with a new way, a better idea (probably a recent grad) and we dismiss the idea as wishful thinking.

In computers more than any other field, this problem is easily apparent. I remember suggesting a very simple change to a database system and being told “you can't do that with computers”. A) You can do pretty much anything with computers. B) I was talking about something that is built into the database software we were using!!! Yes, a standard feature of the software, and the team's top “expert” didn't know about it; and because he was the expert and didn't know about it, it was as though it didn't exist.

More generally, the problem becomes visible when a programmer switches languages. A C programmer who learns Python normally ends up writing his Python code using the features that most resemble those of C. The unique features of Python are designed to overcome specific problems and difficulties with a lower-level language such as C, but to the expert C coder, these aren't really “problems”, because he long ago rationalised them away and learned to cope with them. He doesn't realise there is a “problem”, so he doesn't have any reason to go looking for a solution. Even within languages, some people always do things the “hard way” because they've simply never thought to look for an “easy way”.

So Schank is being hopelessly naïve. The key feature of expertise is automaticity – experts have internalised enough that they don't have to think about what they're doing. They close their minds to learning, because there's more value in doing a job suboptimally but quickly than in doing it optimally but slowly. People need to develop breadth before they become experts – before they become “set in their ways”.

Now to answer the question that started this article, what do we learn when we learn-by-doing?

We learn to be adequate, not brilliant. We learn to get by, not to excel. We learn to stop thinking. We learn, paradoxically, to stop learning.

Horses for courses...

Perhaps my previous pontifications on the word “course” were unconvincing, but I think the word “course” can account for a lot of the problems in modern education.

Last year, I took a year of full-time study. My last exam was on a Friday, and the next day I found myself on a busy train home. I ended up sitting at a table with a couple of guys, and it turned out one of them was a retired tutor from a technical college. In Scotland, “college” has two meanings –either part of a higher education university, or more commonly a further education institute focusing on vocational studies.

 

He was working with trades – very practical, hands-on stuff like welding. He was already working there when the system of “modules” came in. A module, like the word implies, is a self-contained unit of learning, and it's a concept that is all too familiar in all areas of education. Well, this old guy described it as a disaster. The material he was working with, he said, just couldn't be broken down that way; everything was interconnected.

 

But that wasn't unique to his field. Less than a fortnight before, I was in a meeting with a couple of the staff from the course I'd taken discussing my feedback, and this was precisely my complaint there – modularisation.

 

I was studying the second year of a four-year degree scheme, and my initial concern was that I would be lacking some of the prerequisite knowledge from the first year modules. In particular, I was concerned that the module on short-form fiction would rely on literary analysis skills and terminology from the first year. But there was none of that. It was a true module – it was self-contained. No prerequisite knowledge. But that meant that (in my opinion) it sorely lacked depth, and at the end of it, I did not feel that I was ready for degree-level literary analysis courses, as would be expected of me if I continued to the third year. So in turn I concluded that the courses on offer could not be up to the standard I would expect of a third year course.

 

Of course, I do have unforgivingly high standards, in no small part down to the excellent quality of education I received for my first degree (at Edinburgh University).

But still, I felt that my dissatisfaction was caused not because the university I was studying in was not as prestigious as Edinburgh, and not because the teaching staff weren't up to scratch. No, the teaching staff were all well-educated and highly motivated, and had the benefit of an exceptionally good teacher:student ratio.

The biggest problem was simply this word “module”, this idea that skills and knowledge can be compartmentalised and packaged neatly, and this institution had fully implemented a completely modularised syllabus.

Which brings me back to the word “course”, and in particular the three ways the University of Edinburgh used it.

 

In my first year, I did three “courses”: Computer Science, Maths and Artificial Intelligence.

Each of these was composed of two “half-courses”, which would be the equivalent of a “module”. But the very fact that it was a “half” course made it clear that it was not a stand-alone “unit” of education, it was part of an ongoing learning path that extended through the year.

 

The third use of “course” was in the term “degree course”. My “degree course” was Computer Science, and everything I was taught in first and second year was a predetermined path that prepared me for the advanced study of third and fourth year. I had a much freer choice of courses in third year, and it would be tempting to call them “modules” here, but even as we made our third year choices we were all thinking about our final year, as each individual course opened up certain possibilities in the fourth year: our third year choice restricted the path – the course – our fourth year would follow.

 

So while it is true that not every university can be Edinburgh University, it's still useful to look at what Edinburgh does and see if it's worth copying.

 

Some universities pride themselves on having a wide choice of modules on offer. At Edinburgh, I had no choice whatsoever in first or second year. The university identified what I needed to know to prepare for my chosen degree, and they made sure I learned it well. (OK, there was stuff taught that I never really “needed”, but that's by-the-by.) And because we all learned the same things, when it came to third year, the lecturers all knew how much we knew, and they could build on it.

 

This took us further and deeper into every subject than we could have otherwise gone.

 

That's why the word “course” is so important. That's why we've got to know what it means, and what it doesn't mean.  The loss of the word "course" is travelling had in hand with the loss of a controlled progression in learning.

 

The Connectivist school of thought blames traditional schooling for students' poor ability to deal with content at levels of abstraction, whereas I believe it is the modulisation of the syllabus, a fairly recent development, that has caused this problem.  If each semester we start on a new separate module, one that stands alone and refuses to take as given the learning outcomes of specific prerequisite courses, then we are never, as students, taught to integrate our knowledge, and we are never given the opportunity to apply that knowledge at a higher level of abstraction.

 

This is not a small problem, specific to certain institutions – it's a growing problem, and it is becoming written into more and more of the documents that define our education systems.  Under the agreements that created the Bologna Process, students should now be free to move between institutions all over Europe, and in my English classes, I have several students who have moved from other French universities and even one who has transferred in from an Eastern European university to complete her studies in France.

 

The end result is a constant shallowing of our knowledge, and a sad, slow end to a once-great education system...

If a MOOC isn't a course...?

After writing the post on the word “course”, I started pontificating on what a constructionist MOOC is if it's not a “course”.

So I started rewatching Cormier's video What is a MOOC.

Cormier says:

 

After all, as he says, “it has facilitators, course materials, it has a start and an end date, it has participants”

OK so far...

It's also:

 

…good so far....

And it is, “most importantly”:

Cue much philosophising on my part. Is a course an “event”? It doesn't feel like one. Is that because most courses are suboptimal, and therefore unexciting? I could accept that as a valid argument, but I personally have enjoyed many courses that didn't feel like “events” to me, so I was unconvinced.

It's an event “where people can get together and work and talk about it [a topic] in a structured way.” It certainly doesn't sound like a course.

And so it was that one morning earlier this week, I found myself lying in bed, hoping to get another half-hour nap in, and this image in my head:

I could also picture the structure of the change.mooc.ca course, which appears to consist of one guest speaker per week, and free discussion.
 

An event...

...where you choose what material to engage with...

...comprised of a series of guest speakers...

...where there are no assignments...

...and you network with like-minded people...

Eureka! A cMOOC is a conference.

Online conferences have been tried before – live video streaming of a series of scheduled speakers and open “seminars” on text chat – but they've never proved popular.

This, I would argue, is because they attempted to replicate the conference format lock, stock and barrel. But the conference format is a compromise – most importantly, conferences are squeezed into a short space of time because of logistics. You couldn't spread a conference over a couple of months, because people would have to travel back and forth, and it would get very expensive very quickly. This means that the seminar sessions are short and limited – you can't research your response to a talk in the toilet break between the speech itself and the seminar on the topic.

What we have in the Cormier MOOC model is the conference with those time restrictions stripped away. The talks are available wherever you are, without travel, so you can take your time to discuss and research your reactions to them. You're no longer forced to choose between two equally interesting talks just because the scheduler put them on at the same time.

So the MOOC as a “distributed conference” is far better in many respects than a physical conference. It's a good thing, it just isn't a course.  And if conferences are now easier and cheaper to run, we may be able to replace some courses with conferences, but they're still not courses.

Do I feel stupid for rubbishing MOOCs previously, now that I've realised this?

No. My biggest problem developing as a teacher is that people keep suggesting techniques, methods, tools and strategies that “work well” in the classroom, but they never tell me when or why to apply them.

The MOOC guys came up with a great idea, but not only didn't give a clear picture of what it is, what it does, or what it replaces; they claim it's something it's not, it does something it doesn't, and replaces something that it is completely different from.

Putting the cart before the course.

After getting in a discussion with Debbie Morrison on her blog Online Learning Insights, I came to realise that we were misunderstanding each other over the vagueness of the definition of what a MOOC really is, and I was going to write a post about this, when I realised that in order to do that, I would first have to consider what the meaning of the word “course” is.
 

This train of thought had actually been idling in the station for a while, ever since I watched a video of atalk given by Roger Schank to staff at the World Bank. Something Schank said didn't ring true – he described the word “course” as imply a race, winners and losers. I wasn't happy with this interpretation, but it wasn't until I got into the discussion with Debbie that I realised why.

A course is not a race, although many races take place on courses. No, a course is a route, a path. A river finds its “course” to the sea.

Many in Western education look at the Eastern tradition with some sense of awe. We are told that in the East a teacher isn't a “teacher”, but “one who has walked the path”, and a student isn't a “student” but a seeker of knowledge. But the question is: do the Easterners know this?  The origin of our word “course” shows that our system is built on the same philosophy, but we're not aware of this. Maybe they are blind to the meaning of their words, just as we are blind to the meaning of ours.

Now where does that leave us on the meaning of MOOC?

Well, in a rather pedantic sense, the MOOC as proposed by the people who coined the term is not a “course” at all, because there is no set path whatsoever, which is in fact part of the point of connectivist learning theory – the learning experience (for wont of a better term) is driven and steered by the students, with each student finding their own path through the information presented. Cormier says in his video introduction to the idea of a MOOC that there is “no right way to do the course, no single path.” If course is synonymous with path, this is a paradox.

Is it useful to define this as “not a course”? You may not agree with me, but I think it's not only useful, but perhaps even essential.

Connectivism is just the latest combatant in an on-going ideological war between whole-subject and basic skills teaching. Why do I call this an ideological war, and not a pedagogical one? Because neither side really has much of an argument or evidence behind them.

In the real world, basic skills and whole-subject teaching are two ends of a spectrum of teaching styles, and most teachers use different parts of the spectrum at different times.

In general, education follows a progression that starts with the aim of teaching certain well-defined basic skills, then we start to use them in more complex environments. As we progress through our education, we build levels of abstraction over those basic skills.

The question is whether we can learn those basic skills and abstract skills and basic skills at the same time. I personally believe that we can, but that it is less efficient. If you put the cart before the horse, the horse can push it, but it would be more efficient pulling it behind.

But perhaps the reason that the MOOC as proposed by Dave Cormier doesn't really fit the term “course” is because what it aims to replace isn't really a “course” either. Cormier mentions “lifelong learning”, but “lifelong learning” is a term that is in itself ambiguous.

There are two sides to lifelong learning – there's what we'd traditionally call “adult education”, which can be stereotyped as evening classes offering high school or university-level classes to adults who dropped out of the education system at a young age; then there's continuing professional development (CPD) for people who are qualified and working in a degree-educated field. (Well, not two sides, per se, as there's a whole spectrum in between, but never mind.)

I really think that what Cormier did was create something that was far more orientated towards that highest level of abstraction: the qualified, experienced practitioner who already had a well-developed framework for understanding the material presented, and as I said in a previous post, at that stage most professional development takes place in seminars, not in strict “courses”.

The whole concept of informal learning is now firmly entrenched in the Scottish teaching system. Teachers are set targets of CPD points to acquire through the year. Many of these are given through traditional in-service training days and seminars, but teachers are expected to top these up with other things through personal initiative. There is a large catalogue of activities that qualify as optional points, even down to watching a television documentary on a subject related to your teaching field.

That informal online learning is effective for people for whom informal offline learning is already known to be effective should not be a surprise

One of the biggest influences on my thinking about education was Michel Thomas. Thomas studied psychology, and he wanted to study the learning process. He reportedly chose to teach languages for a very simple reason: languages provide the best opportunity to work with a student with zero starting knowledge of the subject being taught. Eliminating the variable of prior knowledge made reaching conclusions about the effectiveness of teaching easier, he reasoned.

The style of teaching he developed is demonstrated in the courses he recorded before his death for Hodder. (He recorded courses in Spanish, French, German and Italian. The other languages released in his name are very different indeed.) They are all examples of very tight control by the teacher, offering a well-defined, clearly sign-posted learning path. As the courses he produced are live recordings with genuine students, you can observe him diverge from his preferred path as a reaction to things said by the student (for example, when one student makes a mistake conjugating a verb in Spanish and accidentally says an imperative, Thomas is forced to introduce the imperative early, because he doesn't want to tell the student that he's wrong), so there's a fair degree of flexibility there, but we can see that there is a definite “course” there.

The amount that the students on the recordings pick up even in just the first 2 hours is quite extraordinary – I've never seen anyone else achieve similar results

But he's working with absolute beginners, and beginners need a path to follow, they need a course. It would be a mistake, I believe, to try to use the term “course” to describe an undirected, pathless learning experience, as this leads to the conclusion that such a learning experience is a replacement for a genuine guided course, when I really think it's only something that can really be done once the student has finished with courses.

A letter to the Scottish Parliament...

The Scottish Parliament has a consultation open on teaching languages in the primary school, with a call for views open until this Friday, the 15th.  I've responded, and as is my wont, my response is rather long and heavily opinionated.  Time was I wouldn't have bothered, assuming I'd just be ignored, but I figure there's no harm in trying, so I dedicated a few hours to drafting the letter that I've included below, for readers' reference.

---

I am currently working as an English teacher in a French university, and have long term plans to be a teacher of languages when I return to Scotland.

I feel the final question in the call for comments is a dangerous question, in that it inadvertantly presupposes a particular policy:

• The role of languages in economic development – what languages should children be learning to benefit their future careers, and to help Scotland flourish economically?
  

There are two assumed features of the policy to be adopted:

1. that the languages should be chosen for reasons of utility and
2. that there should be a restricted list of languages.

On the first point, it is very difficult to predict what foreign languages, if any, will rise to prominence in the next twenty years; and regardless, current evidence shows that the only single language linked to international economic success is English. Attempting to find a utility measure for languages at the school level is therefore a distraction from the main goal of improving language provision.

On the second point, we risk robbing ourselves of the best possible resources we have to hand. The population of teachers in Scotland is very broad and varied, and while most are Scots-born monolinguals, there are also immigrants from various countries, as well as the second-generation of immigrant families who still retain their ancestral languages in the home. The secondary syllabus has space for Community Languages in addition to Modern Foreign Languages, but the list here is very heavily restricted and the option is not available in a great number of schools.

If we look at the case of Ireland, the policy of universal Irish language teaching is widely regarded as a failure. Teachers with no real command of the language cannot teach effectively, and teachers who have no love of the language cannot motivate and enthuse the students.

In order to teach effectively at the primary level, we need teachers who are comfortable and confident in the language they are teaching, and who are teaching out of choice rather than obligation. The level of competence required cannot be achieved with schemes such as Gaelic for Learners in the Primary School. (I would comment that I have heard good feedback from several primary teachers involved in the GLPS scheme, but that at present, teachers in the scheme are a self-selecting minority, all of whom are personally motivated to work with the language. There is no reason to believe that the scheme would continue to be successful if it was imposed on unwilling or unmotivated teachers.)

My belief, therefore, is that language teaching should be encouraged and invested in, but that the choice of language should be entirely at the discretion of the teacher. If the teacher speaks Afrikaans or Aymara, Tongan or Tibetan, the teacher should be free to use that in the class, and not forced to struggle through on pidgin French or Spanish simply because the syllabus demands it.

Opportunities to build language competence in teachers

Around a year ago, I wrote to the ministry suggesting that a special effort should be made in encouraging newly-qualified teachers to take a year abroad in order to reduce the number of teachers completing their probationary year and finding themselves without work. As the provision of languages at primary level has been a goal for many years, this would be a definite career advantage to any candidates taking up such an offer.

In particular, I would draw the committee's attention to the situation in France. I am currently working as a “lecteur”. This is a junior teaching post for graduates with a minimum 4 years of university education, hence any BEd(hons) or PGDE graduate would fulfill the entry criteria.

The problem faced by most universities is that most candidates for these posts have no knowledge or experience of teaching, so the experience for the students varies considerably from year to year.

It is therefore extremely likely that the proposal of a system which would provide a reliable supply of fully-trained teachers with at least one year of classroom experience would be welcomed by the French universities, even despite differences in class age groups.

I would propose a scheme of the following structure:

• Fully qualified and registered teachers are recruited for French universities in Scotland.¹
• An intensive summer course in teaching English, equivalent to the Cambridge CELTA or Trinity TESOL, is provided for successful candidates.²
• Intensive French lessons would be given to each candidate prior to the beginning of the academic year.³
• The yearly salary would be provided by the host institution.⁴
• Ongoing language tuition should be made available by the host institution throughout the year.⁵

I would propose the following division of costs:

• Scottish Government to pay for English-teaching tuition.
• French Government to provide intensive French tuition.
• Host universities cover the costs of ongoing tuition.
• Recruitment costs to be split between Scottish and French governments.

I believe the costs to each body are more than compensated for by the benefits.

The cost to the Scottish Government would likely be no more than the cost of providing equivalent language training alone directly. However, the experience of a year living and working in the language, at no additional cost to the Scottish public purse, would be invaluable to the teachers and hence to the Scottish education system.

France, for its part, would be taking steps to fulfill its current policies on language competence, which stipulate that language is obligatory in almost all higher education, again at no great cost.

The only increase in cost to the host universities would be the marginal cost of ongoing language tuition, which many already offer, and which is a marginal cost against the guarantee of a well-trained, highly motivated classroom teacher, and therefore better pass rates for their students.⁶

The transition from primary to secondary

Having a truly open choice of languages at primary might seem an invitation to disaster at the secondary level, but I would argue the opposite.

Teaching at university level, my students all come from very different backgrounds, hence different high schools. The level of English varies from student to student, and the material they have learned is a result of what has been taught at their various schools. Even though they have had nominally the same education, in practice they are very different. This makes my job extremely difficult, and reduces my value to each individual student.

If the Scottish Government or local councils were to mandate that feeder primaries taught the same languages as used in the secondaries, this would reproduce the issues I currently face in all our secondary schools, as it is inevitable that different primaries would achieve different results with their pupils.

If given the choice between teaching Spanish at high school to a mixed group who had been learning Spanish since P1 at different primary schools, or a mixed group who had learned completely different languages since P1, I would choose the latter. Their previous exposure to language learning would aid them considerably in picking up Spanish, and their shared level of Spanish knowledge (zero) would mean that tasks could be designed and selected that are suitable for all. This is vitally important, because if the tasks are not suitable for all students, it is in practical terms impossible for the teacher to motivate the class, and so there is a real risk that progress in language would be halted at the transition to secondary.

I would therefore suggest that the introduction of a third language at P5 might prove to be counterproductive, and that leaving the third language until secondary would avoid difficult-to-manage mixed-level classes.

In summary, I believe that the choice of language in the primary school should be independent of the local secondary provision and based directly on individual teachers' skills and competencies, and that the best time to introduce a third language is at entry to secondary school, to avoid the situation where classes suffer due to extreme differences in previous knowledge and ability. I believe that we can also leverage the worldwide demand for high quality English teaching to help our primary teachers gain the language competence required to make primary language teaching successful.

Regards,

Níall P. Tracey

1I suggest this mainly for teachers after their probationary year, but there's no reason this couldn't also be offered as a sabbatical scheme to continuing teachers.

2A significant part of the cost of current Celta and Trinity TESOL certificate courses is the accreditation by Cambridge and Trinity respectively. The certification is of much reduced relevance to people already holding a university-level teaching qualification, and as candidates on my proposed scheme are assumed not be looking for further English-teaching work, putting them on an accredited course would be inappropriate. However, this scheme could make use of the excellent installed base of CELTA and TESOL trainers already in Scotland.
In the longer term it may even provide the basis for a new Scottish qualification in the teaching of English to young adults.

3The most practical option would be to host these centrally in a French university and have the teachers attend the course en route to their final host university.

4French universities are part of the public sector, so employees are considered public functionaries. Salaries are non-negotiable and set by statute.

5This language tuition could again be French and/or a local minority language that is taught in the university, eg Basque or Breton.

6Most language assessment is now performed centrally, under a French government scheme called CLES. This is intended to ensure that all universities provide equivalent standards of language tuition.