The Sardinian professor fighting to save Gaelic – and all Europe’s minority tongues

It is an impending extinction that will change the world and how people communicate: within 20 years, half of all the planet’s languages will be dead.

Experts agree that nothing can stop it happening but one academic is trying her hardest to slow it down, to help preserve what may be part of a golden ticket for our brains. Professor Antonella Sorace – a Sardinian who was discouraged from learning her own dying language in favour of “proper” Italian – is one of a growing number who believe learning a second language has enormous untapped benefits for the human brain. This is true not only for young children but also for adults and people at risk from dementia, where research consistently shows that learning a new language could delay the onset of the disease for four to five years – a better result than with any medication to date.

It is those benefits of bilingualism that should encourage us to preserve and protect Britain’s minority languages – Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Irish, Cornish and Ulster Scots, she says.

“All minority languages are declining,” said Sorace, professor of developmental linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. “If a language is not learned by children then that language is bound to die. There are big forces out there that help to speed this process along. Eventually Gaelic will die, Welsh and Sardinian will die. Many of these are languages that are still relatively healthy; others are being actively suppressed or stigmatised.

“We are trying to contribute to slowing that decline. We know linguistic diversity is important because it makes us human. We lose that and we lose an essential part of what it means to be human.”

Already her work and the project she founded three years ago in Edinburgh,Bilingualism Matters – now expanding across Europe and in the US – have convinced the Scottish government to introduce languages to primary schools. From 2020 all Scottish children will be learning a language other than English in their first year at school, with two other languages being introduced later.

“It’s all about the teaching, but young children are adept at picking up tones, so tonal languages, like Mandarin for example, are a lot easier for children than for adults,” she said.

Just as disappearing forests take with them secrets of undiscovered medicines, disappearing languages can take the key to a longer and better quality of life. The first battle is to unpick the popular myth that bilingualism might damage children’s brains. There were even suggestions it could encourage schizophrenia.

Study after study has shown the reverse to be true, says Sorace. “These prejudices are ingrained, but we are perhaps halfway to persuading people that the brain can cope. Then we have to persuade people that it is actually of benefit.

“In Sardinia, if a child speaks Sardinian it’s thought they can’t then speak Italian very well. There is an inferiority complex around these languages. My mother insisted I speak Italian, not this common dialect.”

Bilingualism Matters is working to encourage businesses to consider the benefits of their staff learning languages. “In business, people say ‘English is the language of business, why would I need to learn another language?’” said Sorace. “Maybe it would mean you could do better business.”

There is also the question of how long English can hold its dominance, not only because of the possibility of leaving the EU but also because of China’s emergence as an economic force.

The British are notoriously poor at languages, and interest in taking the subject among schoolchildren has been waning for years – encouraged, Sorace thinks, by parents who do not understand their value. “Monolingualism is a privilege, but also a limitation. Why is Chinese emerging as a powerful language? Because the economy is. The pace is much more rapid than it used to be, so who knows how long it might take for Mandarin to overtake English?”

The Scottish schools language initiative is expected to include Chinese as one of the three languages that will be introduced to primary curriculums.

The refugee crisis is throwing up another concern for Sorace. Many people arriving in new countries are encouraged to take up the language of their new home instead of – rather than alongside – their own. “It is true that some families feel their home language is a problem. They want their child to fully integrate and they think their language will hold them back. This is sometimes the message that comes from the school.

“Even in the Netherlands, a bilingual country, there is this message, you should speak Dutch as soon as possible. Yes of course you must learn to integrate, but don’t speak Dutch to your child. Unfortunately we have this perception that there is a good kind of bilingualism and a bad kind. There is no bad kind.”

Her colleague and research collaborator, Thomas Bak, a reader in human cognitive neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh, agrees: “It is the most important change in our understanding of the brain in recent times. Now we know the brain is not static, a set of drawers where things are stored, it has an elasticity, a cerebral elastic. Now we know that brains adapt and adjust all our lifetime. If you start a sport late you may not get to the Olympics, but it will still impact positively on your health. That’s how I look at it. Linguistics meets neuroscience.”

Bak also grew up “protected” from what were then perceived as the dangers of bilingualism. “As a son of a Polish-speaking father and German-speaking mother in Kraków, my parents took a considered decision to not teach me German, to protect me. They were educated people but thought they were doing what was best.” In the 1960s there were academics linking a “foreign language at home” to “mental retardation”.

But is taking up French really necessary to stave off dementia, as opposed to doing crosswords and sudoku?

“Yes, to use the sports analogy, the fact that swimming is good for you is not to say tennis isn’t,” said Bak. “But with language it’s not just words, its about sounds, social interaction, cultural interaction.” He said there was already some early language research suggesting that the prevalence of dementia may already be declining.

“Maybe we are starting to see the first effects of people trying to avoid the risk factors. Bilingualism doesn’t make you immortal, it doesn’t cure dementia but it delays it. In stroke patients twice as many people in the bilingual group recovered their cognitive abilities completely after a stroke than monolinguals. The bilingual brain is better equipped to cope with the damage.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/mar/13/sardinian-professor-fighting-to-save-gaelic-bilingualism?CMP=twt_gu

HAPPY TEACHER'S DAY!!!!

Highly trained, respected and free: why Finland's teachers are different

In a quiet classroom adorned with the joyful creations of small children, Ville Sallinen is learning what makes Finland’s schools the envy of the world.

Sallinen, 22, is teaching a handful of eight-year-olds how to read. He is nearing the end of a short placement in the school during his five-year master’s degree in primary school teaching.

Viikki teacher training school in eastern Helsinki describes itself as a laboratory for student teachers. Here, Sallinen can try out the theories he has learned at the university to which the school is affiliated. It’s the equivalent of university teaching hospitals for medical students.

The school’s principal, Kimmo Koskinen, says: “This is one of the ways we show how much we respect teaching. It is as important as training doctors.”

Welcome to a country where teaching is a highly prized profession. Finland’s teachers have kept the nation near the top of the influential Pisa performance rankings since they were first published in 2001, leading to an influx of educational tourists as other teachers have endeavoured to learn from the Finnish experience.

Finland is going through a deep economic crisis, and there are financial pressures on schools, just as there are on the rest of the public sector. But the five-year master’s degree for primary school teachers is not in question. Competition is fierce – only 7% of applicants in Helsinki were accepted this year, leaving more than 1,400 disappointed.

Leena Krokfors, professor of teaching at Helsinki University, says: “The beef in the Finnish teacher training system is the time that students have to learn, and while politicians are happy for Finland to produce good teachers, that’s OK.”

The high-level training is the basis for giving young teachers a great deal of autonomy to choose what methods they use in the classroom – in contrast to England, Krokfors says, where she feels teaching is “somewhere between administration and giving tests to students”. In Finland, teachers are largely free from external requirements such as inspection, standardised testing and government control; school inspections were scrapped in the 1990s.

“Teachers need to have this high-quality education so they really do know how to use the freedom they are given, and learn to solve problems in a research-based way,” Krokfors says. “The most important thing we teach them is to take pedagogical decisions and judgments for themselves.”

In Britain, by contrast, academies, private schools and free schools can hire people to teach even if they are not qualified. Labour claimed in 2013 that becoming a teacher in Britain was now easier than flipping burgers.

For a small, agrarian and relatively poor nation, educating all of its youth equally well was seen as the best way to catch up with other industrialised countries, according to Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish educationist at Harvard who has done much to popularise Finland’s methods abroad.

In the early phase, during the 70s and 80s, there was strict central direction and control over schools, state-prescribed curriculums, external school inspections and detailed regulation, giving the Finnish government a strong grip on schools and teachers. But a second phase, from the early 90s, consciously set out to create a new culture of education characterised by trust between educational authorities and schools, local control, professionalism and autonomy. Schools became responsible for their own curriculum planning and student assessment, while state inspections were abandoned. This required teachers to have high academic credentials and be treated like professionals.The Finnish dream, as he calls it, was for all children, regardless of family background or personal conditions, to have a good school in their community – a focus that has remained unchanged for the past four decades. 

Krokfors adds her own explanation for the high regard in which teachers are held: “If we look back at Finland’s history, teachers have always been seen as the people who brought civilisation to small villages” as the country modernised in the middle of the last century, she says.

Not only is teacher education in Finland strongly research-based, but all the students on the primary school master’s course are engaged in research themselves – a point of pride for Patrik Scheinin, dean of the faculty. The course aims to produce “didacticians” who can connect teaching interventions with sound evidence, he says.

“We want to produce cognitive dissonance. The task of a good didactician is to disturb the thinking of someone who assumes they know everything about teaching,” Scheinin says. “Just because you’ve been doing something for 20 years and it works for you doesn’t mean it works for other teachers, other students, or in other subjects.”

In the city centre at Helsinki Normal Lyceum, another of the 11 university teacher training schools scattered around the country, student teachers are running day-long multidisciplinary workshops for pupils aged 13 to 19. In one, Maria Hyväri, 24, is discussing Dewey, Steiner and Montessori, and asking pupils to think critically about teaching methods at the school. Classes are mixed and there is no streaming.

“I want to make a difference,” she says. “There are all these new teaching tools and ideas, and it’s great because here we can try different things – it makes me feel inspired.” Because the school is full of student teachers, pupils are “used to being experimented on,” she says, although sometimes they might get a bit tired of the constant rotation.

Hyväri is in the middle of an undergraduate degree in French and English, but she has chosen to take an additional pedagogical year in the middle of her five-year degree, which will launch her on to a teaching track in her final two years to emerge qualified as a secondary school teacher. During this year she spends about half her time in the school, and half in the university’s teaching department.

For Olli Mättää, a teacher trainer at the school, Finland’s Pisa scores are a byproduct of the system rather than a central goal. “When we got the results, we were thinking, if we are that good, how bad are the others? We were taken by surprise,” he says.

ducationists point to historically specific factors that have helped to fashion Finland’s schools, such as the country’s small population, its relatively late dash for modernity, and broad acceptance of values such as equality and collaboration that are embedded in its version of the Nordic welfare model. But the decision to make teaching an advanced degree subject has given teaching a high profile in Finnish society.

“Teachers in Finland are autonomous professionals, respected for making a difference to young people’s lives,” says Sahlberg.

As a result, those who choose to train are devoted to teaching for life, he says. “My concern is with fast track teacher preparation programmes turning teaching into something you do for a while and move on, and almost anyone can do it.”

Back in primary school, Ville Sallinen got the teaching bug eight years ago while still at school, when he started coaching football. It sparked his interest in working with children. He is not particularly academic, he says, but like many students his passion for teaching got him on to the master’s course.

“I would like to have more experience in schools like what we are having now,” Sallinen says. “Next year we have no practical element. It is good to get experience in a real school.”

At the end of each day, he sits down with his mentor, Tunja Tuominen, to deconstruct teaching moments and to theorise them. Says Tuominen: “Student teachers come here like little chicks, mouths wide open and eager to learn.”

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http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jun/17/highly-trained-respected-and-free-why-finlands-teachers-are-different?CMP=fb_gu

Are teachers ready for the coding revolution?

There's a revolution coming to schools across England, one designed to transform a new generation's prospects in the digital age. Come September, a change to the curriculum means the study of computing - and specifically coding - will be mandatory across all state primary and secondary schools.

That also means that something like 16,000 ICT teachers in secondary schools and more than 160,000 primary school teachers face a huge challenge - getting ready to teach the new discipline in time.

Where better to assess their readiness than BETT, the annual education technology fair. I spent yesterday in the vast halls of the Excel exhibition centre talking to teachers, children and even Education Secretary Michael Gove, about what the arrival of coding in the curriculum might mean.

To see two primary school pupils, Ruby and Sienna, working together to make a Raspberry Pi-controlled vehicle move around the floor with a few lines of code, was to understand what's possible. They admitted that coding could be difficult at first - but both were having a lot of fun.

They were benefitting from the work of one of an army of enthusiasts now descending on schools to help prepare for the coding revolution. Tom Stacey, a PhD student, invented the PiBot, the vehicle the girls were controlling. "It's when you combine hardware - something that they can actually touch - with writing lines of code that it actually comes alive," he told me.

Meanwhile, teachers at BETT seemed determined to be upbeat about the arrival of coding. Jonathan Furness, a primary school head teacher, admitted it was "a big ask - we're very much up against it".

With every teacher at primary level having to teach computing, there would need to be resources for staff development, and consultants would be coming into school to help. But he said, "our children are revved up" about coding and the teachers would come with them.

Gary Spracklen, head of digital at an academy in Dorset, said the key was to deal with the fear of learning a whole new language. "Everyone thinks it's a huge step onto a high level - but the message is we need to break it down and start small."

And that was echoed by Carrie-Ann Philbin, a great evangelist for inventive ways of using technology in the classroom, who's just joined Raspberry Pi: "It sounds like a steep learning curve," she admitted when I asked whether older teachers might be intimidated by coding. "But those big words like algorithm and data, when you actually dig deeper you see they're not scary."

So - what of the man who has ordered this revolution in classrooms? Michael Gove told me he accepted that a lot was being asked of teachers. But he insisted, "We're giving teachers all the support they need". He praised "outstanding teachers who understand and get computer science", and said they would be helping colleagues. "And we're making sure we get more talented people from the computing industry who think about teaching and are attracted into the classroom," he said.

And he said there was no alternative to making this work if we didn't want the Googles and Microsofts of tomorrow to be created elsewhere. "Schools will be better places and children will be better prepared for the future if they understand the language of the future - and that is computer programming."

From cabinet ministers pushing a policy and every kind of business promoting their products, to evangelical computing teachers, BETT attracts those with a determinedly optimistic view of the role technology can play in schools.

But in the real world, cynics will point at initiatives from language laboratories to electronic whiteboards to classrooms packed with obsolete desktop computers that have left many teachers underwhelmed. Will the drive to get children coding be different? And will schools be ready? If you're a teacher with a view on your own or your school's readiness for this revolution, please get in touch.

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25857276