LLAS News Blog

News articles of interest to higher education LLAS subject fields.

Thursday 30 June 2011

German teachers campaign to simplify handwriting in schools

t has long been a painful rite of passage for German schoolchildren – learning "die Schreibschrift", a fiddly form of joined-up handwriting all pupils are expected to have mastered by the time they leave primary school.

But now, many German teachers have had enough, insisting it is a waste of time to force children to learn a cursive script when they have already learned to print letters at kindergarten. Furthermore, they say, the joined-up handwriting is often illegible.

The Guardian

Vous êtes congédié! Monoglots bad for business

British business is losing out because of the nation's foreign language failings - yet academics are struggling to convince their universities to do anything about it.

Those were among the issues raised in The Future of UK Modern Languages, a debate organised by the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies and the Modern Humanities Research Association.

Times Higher Education

Wednesday 15 June 2011

Baroness Cousins raises languages in the Lords

My Lords, I will raise briefly two or three issues connected with modern languages in relation to some of the Bill's objectives. I declare an interest as chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Modern Languages.

Lihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifnk to speech

Monday 6 June 2011

British academics launch £18,000 humanities college in London

A new British college aiming to rival Oxford and Cambridge has been launched by leading academics.

New College of the Humanities will give a high-quality education to "gifted" undergraduates and a degree from the University of London, creators say.

BBC news