BBC Radio 4 August and September 2010

Report from Helen Myers

The BBC 4 Radio programme You and Yours on 31st August was about 'Why Learn Languages?' following headlines of GCSE French dropping out of the top ten subjects.

The language teacher community was alerted via various email fora (Yahoo mflresources, TES forum, Twitter), and I joined with many others, listening and 'tweeting' ongoing comments.

In response to this, Joe Dale (language advisor, very experienced in operating in online environments and well known and respected in the mfl community) offered to organise a Flashmeeting where the programme could be discussed further, and a link to this recording of was sent to the BBC.

The BBC was interested in the comments made about severe grading and asked me to appear on a follow up programme. They played excerpts from the Flashmeeting relevant to this topic (including Valerie McIntyre, John Connor and myself.)

It was really good to have the opportunity to try and explain the situation to a wider audience and I hope that something might come of this. Here is a link to the programme which is on iPlayer

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00tnptn/You_and_Yours_15_09_2010/

The timing is from 0658 - 1820

Here is a link to an embedded mp3 file.

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