The Linguist

6 The Linguist Vol/59 No/6 2020 thelinguist.uberflip.com NEWS & EDITORIAL In the media PHILIP HARDING-ESCH As the new academic year began in the UK, and the pandemic continued, there was a focus on policy issues. In England, the government turned the screw on funding for modern foreign languages (MFL) post- Covid in a series of announcements. Schools Week reported that bursaries for trainee MFL teachers are being reduced from £26,000 to just £10,000, while the flagship DfE Scholarship is being scrapped altogether, along with "early careers" payments. This prompted concerns in the TES that the MFL recruitment and retention crisis will get worse: "Although applications to ITE [initial teaching education] have increased because of the pandemic, the effect could be short-lived and underlying problems are likely to remain." On the plus side, the paper also reported that government-sponsored private school teacher training partnerships appeared to be very successful, allaying fears that they would disproportionately benefit independent schools. Meanwhile, the National Association of Language Advisers published a report based on interviews with more than 500 language professionals, saying that language GCSEs are biased against poor pupils, students in care and those with special needs. As the TES noted, this is because questions require responses based on personal experiences which these groups are less likely to have. This is backed up by an OECD report, quoted in The Telegraph: "among 79 countries, the UK ranked in the bottom four in hours dedicated to perfecting second language skills in secondary schools". Although Scotland did the worst of all four UK nations, The National celebrated the success of its '1+2' languages policy. The National Centre for Languages stated "languages as a whole enjoy a higher percentage uptake than biology or physics" in Highers over the last seven years. As ever, language policy is a long game! Philip Harding-Esch is a freelance languages project manager and consultant. What worked best as asks what techniques Learning L ockdown caused us all to adapt the way we work. Worldwide, teachers stepped up to the challenge of delivering lessons remotely. For languages teachers, who distil a cocktail of cognitive skills into an engaging format for pupils to absorb, practise and produce in front of them daily, this challenge was arguably greater than it was for most. How did they teach? What worked best? What did teachers learn that they have taken back into the classroom? We sought to answer these questions through a survey of languages teachers. The vast majority of the 105 respondents teach at UK secondary schools, with 9% at primary and 10% at schools outside the UK. We hope the data is a representative sample to inform best practice going forward. So what did languages teaching and learning look like during lockdown? The French press complain to EU Hundreds of thousands of people have been unable to access the British government's Covid-19 contact-tracing app because it only supports 12 languages. Users whose phones are set to languages such as German, Italian and Portuguese have not been able to use it. Faced with a black screen, some reported deleting the app because they assumed it wasn't working. Although the app is available in English, Welsh and widely spoken languages such as Polish, Bengali and Arabic, some of the most common languages spoken in the UK are not supported, including French and Tamil. Concerns were raised that visitors would be unlikely to change their phones' language settings while staying in England and Wales. Covid-19 app unsupported © SHUTTERSTOCK French journalists have complained to the European Union about the institutions' increasingly monolingual media communications. Members of the Association of European Journalists described the lack of press releases in any working language other than English as a "repeated practice, now almost systematic". They stressed that this gives an unfair "competitive advantage to the English-speaking press, which does not need to translate and can simply copy and paste extracts". Legally, EU communications must be written in several EU languages. A face mask that translates speech in eight languages is in the final stages of production. The C-Face device is designed to be worn over a face mask and does not itself offer protection from Covid-19, but it does enable people to talk at a safe distance of up to 10 metres apart. Made by Japanese developers Donut Robotics, it will be released in February, covering languages including Japanese, Korean, English and French. Mask translator

• Cover