New Community Languages Curriculum Guides

The recent DfES Languages Review describes our community languages as a 'national asset'. It is therefore vital to ensure that children's achievements in this area are recognised and valued. It goes without saying that many community languages are also of increasing commercial importance, but resources are sometimes more limited for these languages. As a result of this, CILT, The National Centre for Languages, has just launched a new series of publications called Curriculum guides for community languages .

The guides, which were developed as a Goldsmiths College project with the support of the Nuffield Foundation, provide a flexible framework to support the design and delivery of courses in both mainstream and complementary sectors. The guides are available in Arabic, Chinese, Panjabi, Tamil and Urdu and draw on recent policy developments in Language teaching, including the Key Stage 2 Framework and the Key Stage 3 Strategy. They are also linked to the Languages Ladder, which promises to be the development with the strongest impact in terms of recognition of existing language skills.

The detailed framework maps a clear linguistic progression across topics and suggests a variety of activities to develop both oracy and literacy. The guides embed a major focus on intercultural awareness and creativity, and also gives serious consideration to assessment, grammar and the development of learner independence. Up-to-date resource information and materials will be provided on a related website.

PDFs of the guides may be downloaded for free from
http://community.gold.ac.uk/ (Goldsmiths website). To access the guides you will need to create a new account (if you are not already registered), then click on Community Languages Resource Base in list of available courses. [Hard copies can be bought from CILT for £8].