Punjabi, Urdu, Cantonese ... communities don�t sound like they used to, and some think this should be a learning opportunity. By Gordon Cairns

Gordon Cairns

A leading Scottish academic has called for community languages to be taught more widely at higher education level, at a time when the number of students reading languages at university continues to fall.

The four most widely spoken community languages in Scotland are Punjabi, Urdu, Cantonese and Polish, but it is only possible to study the latter two at university level.

Joanna McPake, director for the Scottish Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research believes children who study these languages at school should have the same opportunities to study at a higher level as students of the traditional top three - French, German and Spanish - to benefit the students and fill vital positions in the future.

She said: "We have a fantastic resource, it is likely that the UK is the most multi-lingual country in Europe but we don't do anything to capitalise on this resource. We don't enable people to go on to study these languages at a higher level."

McPake recently wrote a report on the community language system in England, where she feels that children who study a community language at school are unfairly treated by the system. "A lot of pupils are taking community language exams and a reasonable number of these students have passed. But none of these languages are offered at Higher Education level in England. The children who have passed these exams can't take these subjects any higher, unlike pupils who have chosen to study the more traditional languages.

"But Scotland is worse off. We don't have as many highly qualified people teaching at school level and we are not offering the same range of qualifications. So, many students in Scotland who study a community language outside of school have to sit exams in the English system to get the qualifications."

It isn't as if the demand is not there, she added: "There is a real shortage of public sector translators such as transcribers for courts or working in hospitals and in the business sector. You really needed to have studied at a high level to do these jobs properly, but we are not giving people the means to prepare for these professions.

"Growing up speaking Chinese at home would allow someone to apply for a translator's job but they probably wouldn't be able to read or write Chinese. Most community language speakers are fluent but not literate."

Meanwhile, there has been a 5% fall in the numbers of students studying foreign languages in Scotland in only five years. German has been the worst affected, with an almost 20% fall in student numbers, followed by French with a 6% fall and then Spanish dropping 1.5% in its school uptake.

However, McPake, who presented her paper on Community Languages as part of the Languages of the Wider World conference at the School in London last week, stressed she did not wish traditional languages to be replaced on either school or university curricula by community languages: "I don't see it as a competition between modern and community languages."

She added students would learn transferable skills through studying a traditional language to be utilised when learning another. "Mandarin isn't easy to learn, but students will have learned techniques from studying other languages.

"Once upon a time everybody did Latin or Greek, which aren't easy but were intellectual challenges. In some ways it is useful to consider Chinese in the same way."

Her conference paper's main recommendation was that the five most widely spoken community languages in England should be taught in five separate English universities, which could also be the way forward in Scotland. "Although in Scotland I would recognise there are smaller numbers of community language speakers, we need to consider that we would have a group of students who would not be starting from scratch," she said.

"We also have a starting point as we already have the Confucius Centre at Edinburgh University and Polish is taught at Glasgow University."

Dr Murray Hill, the Scottish representative on the UK Standing Conference of Heads of Modern Languages in Universities, shares McPake's view that languages currently being taught should not be jettisoned to make way for new languages.

Dr Hill has petitioned the Scottish Parliament over the urgent need to vigorously promote foreign language learning in Scotland's education system. He said: "I agree strongly that other languages, such as Mandarin, should be promoted but not at the expense of learning the languages of our own EU near neighbours'.

"We also need to examine carefully how more complex languages such as Mandarin can be successfully introduced into the school curriculum, where we are currently failing to succeed with European languages at post Standard Grade levels and in particular to provide continued language learning opportunities for all in Scottish universities."