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Dutch Shares Stage With Frisian in European Parliament
European Parliament is dedicating a session to Europe’s minority languages, and Frisian is getting...
Russian Retreat in Ukraine
The Ukrainian parliament (Verkhovna Rada) has passed a bill requiring that 75% of national...
Canada Boosts Support for French in the Territories
Major funding increases for Francophone communities in the western Canadian territories of Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut have been announced. For more than...
Queremos Galego
Under the slogan, “Non queremos ser estranxeiras na propia patria. Queremos Galego!” (We don’t want to be strangers in our own country. We want...
Opposition to Puerto Rico’s Schools Cuts
Last month, the presidents of the American Federation of Teachers and the Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico (the Puerto Rico Teachers Association) co-signed a letter to the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico, describing the harmful impact of the deep education cuts over the past decade and the devastating consequences additional proposed reductions would have on students and Puerto Rico’s future.
UK Push to Train Language Teachers
Despite Brexit–or maybe because of it–there is a desperate shortage of world language teachers in the UK, so the government is launching a program to train native speakers of French, German, and Spanish to become teachers.
The plan is to create opportunities for people with linguistic skills, whether they are living in the UK or elsewhere in Europe. “There may be people who speak French, German, or Spanish – in the UK or abroad – who would like to consider a career change and go into teaching,” said Gaynor Jones, director of the National Modern Languages SCITT (School Centred Initial Teacher Training). “For some, it could be an opportunity to experience a different culture as well as using their talents for the benefit of students keen to learn a new language.
Court Seeks to Restore Ukrainian in Crimea
From 2013 to 2016, the number of students in Crimea in classes with Ukrainian as the language of instruction dropped from 13,589 to just 371 in 2016, according to a report by the Crimean Human Rights Group, an independent organization, citing data from Crimea’s Education Ministry.
Human Rights Watch, a well-respected, nonprofit, nongovernmental human rights organization, spoke to parents who said that officials of the schools their children attend pressured them not to enroll their children in classes with Ukrainian as the language of instruction and then cut those classes from the curriculum because there allegedly were not enough pupils.
Quebec French Tests Challenged
Quebec’s Ministry of Immigration, Diversity, and Inclusiveness has been accused of using French test results as an excuse to violate the constitutional rights of...
Hong Kong Asked to Prove Mandarin Instruction Works
Hong Kong’s Audit Commission has asked the Education Bureau to prove the effectiveness of using Standard Mandarin (or Putonghua) as the medium of instruction...
Calls to Promote and Protect Arabic
In Abu Dhabi, Shaikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, minister of Culture and Knowledge Development, told the Federal National Council (FNC)-the legislature of the...
Kazakhstan Spells Out Script Swap
Kazakhstan's President Nazarbayev has announced a timeline to switch the country's writing system over from the Cyrillic to the Latin script with full implementation...
Prince Edward Island Fighting to Support French
One of eastern Canada’s maritime provinces off New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island (PEI), is fighting to protect French language schools...