This document discusses different strategies for teaching foreign languages in Scottish schools in the late 1960s and 1970s. It describes three main strategies that were tried: 1) using a classical grammar school curriculum for all students regardless of ability, 2) using the grammar school curriculum for more able students and a watered-down version for others, and 3) using the grammar school curriculum only for elite students while others took courses focused on everyday life in the target language country. It also discusses teaching methods that combined classical and audio-visual techniques, as well as debates around making foreign language learning compulsory or optional for different groups of students in the 1970s.

1. Teaching and Learning in Lothian
schools

2. Result
• As early as possible, at the end of S2, the vast
majority of average achievers and low
achievers abandoned language study, leaving
only 30-35%, who would earlier have gone to
a grammar or senior secondary school, to
continue.

3. First Strategy
• Take the classical humanist Gradus ad
Parnassum curriculum of the grammar or
senior secondary school.
• Use it in all classes irrespective of the ability or
level of achievement of the pupils.

4. Second Strategy
• Use the grammar school curriculum with the
more able, and to water it down for the lower
achievers.
• The were objections to the sort of watering down
and removing of conceptual challenge that such
courses for the lower achievers implied. One of
the most powerful is Hirst. Hirst proposed that
school accommodate the less able but it must not
be by losing the essential concepts. (Hirts, 1969)

5. Third Strategy
• Use the grammar school curriculum for the
elite.
• Provide the rest with a different course
centered on background studies, in which the
pupils learnt about the everyday life of a
country in English, together with a smattering
of the foreign language.

6. Teaching Activity
• some classroom practices which derived from the
classical humanist approach were retained, to which
some of the newer audio-visual techniques associated
with reconstructionism were added.
• In classical humanist terms, language was seen as an
amalgram of forms—an external body of knowledge to
ingested
• In reconstrtructionism terms, language was seen as a
set of skills to be practised through listening, speaking,
reading and writing and as a set of speech routines
assiciated with physical situations or topic areas, which
could be learnt and repeated.

7. Teaching Steps
1. The class would study dialogues or text as a whole.
Teacher would attempt to ensure comprehension
through lengthy question-and-answer routines in the
foreign language.
2. Teachers turn the attention to the practice of the
forms. Teaches tended to adopt an eclectic approach,
switching between deductive and inductive methods;
slot and filler drills, and written exercises, oral role
plays, written assignments.
3. Pupils were not encourage to express meanings that
they had not rehearsed. Opportunities for
spontaneous communication were not provided.

8. Foreign language teachers’
attitudes

9. • 1975 : the governmnet set up the Munn and
Dunning Committees to reform the curriculum
and assessment arrangements in Scottish
school in S3 and S4
• Purpose: to make them more relevant to the
whole ability range.

10. • Issue: whether or not foreign language
learning should be compulsory for all pupils in
S3 and S4
• Or compulsory for some and optional for
others
• Or optional for only the better pupils but not
available to the less able.