English Baccalaureate

An addendum to the White Paper makes it clear which subjects will be counted in the new English Baccalaureate. (EBacc??)

http://www.linguista.es/resources/ebacc_addendum.pdf

"Humanity" includes history, geography and ancient history. Not religious education, though. I am pleased, however, that more pupils will end up doing history or geography. It should be both though.

There will no doubt be some debate about which languages are eligible. Hindi, ancient Greek, Latin and biblical Hebrew appear, but no other "community languages".

The government is going to publish league tables in January 2011 to indicate how schools woud have performed under the new regime which will include the full range of EBacc subjects. Seems a bit odd, given no-one knew about the new diploma until recently. They will also publish data based on the existing benchmark of 5 GCSE passes at C or better including maths and English.

The new policy is already having an effect. My own authority (North Yorkshire) is consucting an audit of MFL provision. Looks like they are having a minor panic.

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What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought. ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

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La retraite à 60 ans

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