Skip to main content

What went wrong with Asset Languages?

In the news recently has been the fact that OCR, who run the Asset Languages scheme (part of what was at one time called the languages ladder), have decided to cut down on the number of languages it offers. The Asset Languages courses will be scaled back to just French, German, Spanish, Italian and Mandarin, with the cutbacks hitting less popular languages, including community languages.

This is the current list of languages offered:  Arabic, Bengali, Cantonese, Cornish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Panjabi, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Turkish, Urdu, Welsh and Yoruba.

Helen Ward, writing in the TES, records the following entry figures for some of the languages in 2012:
  • 13,887 French
  • 6,940 Spanish
  • 241 Arabic
  • 24 Turkish
  • 13 Greek
These figures are not very high and suggest that the whole languages ladder idea has not really caught on. Let's recall that it was originally set up to allow students and adults to make progress with languages in the same way they might with a musical instrument. Just as a youngster works through the grades at piano, so they would with a language. The availability of a clear and transparent set of grades would increase interest and take-up.

Some schools, primaries and secondaries, including my former school for a while, have made use of the lower levels so that those studying a language for a short time can get a recognised qualification. But I would imagine that entries for the higher levels never got going at all. The original plan was for students to be able to move right up to beyond advanced level to mastery, but I see from the Asset web site that this is no longer the case.

One problem has been that there is no syllabus for Asset, just an examination, so teachers who are used to very specific lists of topics, grammar and vocabulary have been put off. They fear the unknown. Another issue has no doubt been the cost of entries and the bureaucracy involved in doing teacher assessment. But the main problem has been that the government has not recognised Asset as an equivalent to GCSE in league tables and the awareness among the general public has been minimal.


It's a shame. I was involved with Asset, writing intermediate papers whilst OCR, drawing on the experience of Cambridge Assessment, I believe, were very professional. Questions went through a detailed editing process and were pre-tested (not something that happens with GCSE questions). On the other hand, not to offer a detailed syllabus for every language was a mistake.

Fundamentally, there has been a political failure. This is a classic case of a decent idea not properly followed through and now OCR are shrinking it for financial reasons. If it doesn't pay, don't do it. Sound familiar?

******************************************************************************

Update: October 8th 2013. OCR announced that Asset Languages is no more.


































Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 langua...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zaz - Si jamais j'oublie

My wife and I often listen to Radio Paradise, a listener-supported, ad-free radio station from California. They've been playing this song by Zaz recently. I like it and maybe your students would too. I shouldn't really  reproduce the lyrics here for copyright reasons, but I am going to translate them (with the help of another video). You could copy and paste this translation and set it for classwork (not homework, I suggest, since students could just go and find the lyrics online). The song was released in 2015 and gotr to number 11 in the French charts - only number 11! Here we go: Remind me of the day and the year Remind me of the weather And if I've forgotten, you can shake me And if I want to take myself away Lock me up and throw away the key With pricks of memory Tell me what my name is If I ever forget the nights I spent, the guitars, the cries Remind me who I am, why I am alive If I ever forget, if I ever take to my heels If one day I run away Remind me who I am, wha...
Post a Comment
Read more

Longman's Audio-Visual French

I'm sitting here with my copies of Cours Illustré de Français Book 1 and Longman's Audio-Visual French Stage A1 . I have previously mentioned the former, published in 1966, with its use of pictures to exemplify grammar and vocabulary. In his preface Mark Gilbert says: "The pictures are not... a mere decoration but provide further foundation for the language work at this early stage." He talks of "fluency" and "flexibility": "In oral work it is advisable to persist with the practice of a particular pattern until the pupils can use it fluently and flexibly. Flexibility means, for example, the ability to switch from one person of the verb to another..." Ah! Now, the Longman offering, written by S. Moore and A.L. Antrobus, published in 1973, just seven years later, has a great deal in common with Gilbert's course. We now have three colours (green, black and white) rather than mere black and white. The layout is arguably more attrac...
26 comments
Read more