Ethnic Minority Achievement
Promoting and Supporting Community Languages in Schools
I am engaged in trying to promote Community Language exams in our secondary schools. There are a surprising number of students with the first or even second language skills in our schools, including some fairly recent arrivals. Thanks to the work of my colleagues, I have been able to identify many and meet with some of these students. It is very good for their self-esteem (not to mention the schools' results) for them to be able to get a good grade in their own language. There are three boards that offer GCSEs in some Community Languages.
Edexcel offers: Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Japanese, Russian and Urdu.
OCR offers: Farsi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Portuguese and Turkish.
AQA offers: Bengali, Polish and Urdu.
Unfortunately not all of the languages spoken by our students are available for examination. The reason for this is numbers: exam boards need a minimum of a thousand candidates for it to be financially viable to produce a GCSE exam.
The modern GCSE exam includes an oral test, and finding a suitable examiner can be difficult. However, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese can be taken without an oral exam.
Another aspect of this is finding suitable oral examiners in some of these languages. READS has recently sent out a questionnaire to all secondary schools in the county in order to find out which languages teachers know. This is at the moment an unknown and untapped resource. To know what languages are spoken is not only useful from an examination point of view, but also potentially useful in dealing with new arrivals. I have already received a few returns and they have yielded some surprising results. Please encourage schools to complete and return them to me at READS.
For further information, please contact me at: READS on 01452 427261 or email reads@gloucestershire.gov.uk
Thank you very much,
Martin Dodds
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