Michael Gove Proposes Teaching Foreign Languages from Age Five
THE GUARDIAN: Education secretary outlines plans ahead of Tory conference, including extension of school day and tougher truancy fines

The education secretary, Michael Gove, has proposed that every child aged five or over should be learning a foreign language, and promised to "pull every lever", including encouraging longer school days, to make it happen.

In a pre-Conservative conference interview, he says: "There is a slam-dunk case for extending foreign language teaching to children aged five.

"Just as some people have taken a perverse pride in not understanding mathematics, so we have taken a perverse pride in the fact that we do not speak foreign languages, and we just need to speak louder in English. It is literally the case that learning languages makes you smarter. The neural networks in the brain strengthen as a result of language learning." » | Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt | Friday, September 30, 2011

THE GUARDIAN: Conservative conference: Gove spells out next step on his agenda for schools: Education secretary talks to the Guardian about his proposals for teaching modern languages and denies free schools are elitist » | Nicholas Watt and Patrick Wintour | Friday, September 30, 2011

Pupils to Learn a Language in GCSE Shake-up
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Foreign languages will be made virtually compulsory up to the age of 16 under an overhaul of the education system being announced today.

A shake-up of league tables used to rate schools will force growing numbers of teenagers to take GCSEs in subjects such as French, German and Spanish.

The Coalition said the move would counter the "catastrophic decline" of languages witnessed under Labour following the decision to make them optional at 14.

Ministers say the reforms will also promote the study of other traditional subjects such as history, geography and science, which have fallen in popularity over the past 13 years. >>> Andrew Porter, Robert Winnett and Graeme Paton | Wednesday, November 24, 2010

More Balls from Ed Balls!
TIMES ONLINE: Labour will announce today that primary school children will be able to learn Mandarin and Arabic in a bid to keep up with other countries. Labour to offer Arabic and Mandarin lessons to primary pupils >>> Joanna Sugden | Monday, January 04, 2010

The Wonders of Childhood
GLOBE AND MAIL: Study adds to research on ability of infants to recognize dialects long before they can speak themselves

Even with the sound turned off, babies can tell whether a person speaking on video has switched between English and French, a new study suggests.

The findings are the latest contribution to a growing body of research on the remarkable ability of very young infants to process languages.

The paper also shows that babies growing up in bilingual households are better able to retain that ability to visually perceive a switch to another language, whereas such a skill declines among those raised in unilingual settings. French and English look different to babies (more) By Tu Thanh Ha

Mark Alexander