education

Languages at primary school – what’s the point?

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From September this year, it’s going to be compulsory for primary schools in the UK to teach a foreign language. This is causing quite a lot of stress for schools, according to a report published earlier this week, which says that 29% of teachers don’t feel confident about teaching a language to their students. That’s … Read more

Rising Demand for English as a Foreign Language Reveals Spain’s Biggest Educational Bugbears

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Today we welcome back guest blogger Eve Pearce, with an interesting article about the demand for language learning in Spain, and its implications for the future. It is rather ironic that while numbers of Brits studying a foreign language to A-level have dropped dramatically over the past few years, nearby Spain – officially out of one of … Read more

Languages for the future: the top ten

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A recent report by the British Council has laid out the ten most important languages for the UK’s future, in political, economic, educational and cultural terms. According to the report, the ten most important languages, in order, are: Spanish, Arabic, French, Mandarin, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Turkish and Japanese. I read this list with a … Read more

A step closer to one billion children

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If you’ve been on our Facebook or Twitter page recently, you may have noticed some of our photos from our recent trip to Malawi. Although some members of our office are convinced we went over there to buy beans for our new coffee machine, we were actually there to run an evaluation on the success … Read more

Language learning in UK schools: what does the future hold?

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Recent news that the numbers of pupils taking a modern foreign language to A-level in the UK have fallen dramatically did not come as a huge surprise to me. According to the latest A-level results, there has been a 9.9% fall in candidates taking French, and an even more depressing 11.1% fall in those taking … Read more

Lost in translation: making sense of maths

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Reading Nat’s post about all the fascinating linguistic differences and difficulties that she and her translators experienced when translating the new uTalk app, I was reminded of some of the similar issues we’ve had in localising the maths apps. What seems totally normal to a three-year-old in the UK might not be all that familiar … Read more

So, did you know you can speak Greek?

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Today’s blog post is written by Konstantia Sotiropoulou, who’s been helping us to translate and record our Maths apps in Greek. I bumped into the picture below a while ago and I thought this should be interesting. Undoubtedly, Greek is one of the richest languages in the world and is distinguished by an extensive vocabulary. In … Read more

A visit to Malawi

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I visited Malawi for a week last month. My first impressions were the enthusiasm and happiness shown by so many Malawians. But real problems are just under the surface. For example, a serious petrol shortage means at least eight-hour waits at petrol stations. During my visit, we installed gadgets (iPod touches) in two locations: Primary school … Read more

Is it OK to be Monolingual?

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When England’s GCSE results came out at the end of August the British press were quick to report on the declining numbers of students taking the qualification in a foreign language: 12% fewer students than in 2010 sat the exam, and this is part of a continuing downward trend over the last few years. The … Read more