Two videos from the Association for Scottish Literary Studies (ASLS) Schools conference 2020. How are teachers prepared to teach Scots language and literature? Dr Maureen Farrell, University of Glasgow, starts off by outlining the problems, “I would say that is true of almost all of our students, they’ve got very little knowledge of Scottish language and when you ask them if they can speak Scots they mostly say no…You have no idea how much I have to work to get them to understand that Scots is not a dialect that it’s a language, and those are people who are generally quite well disposed to Scottish literature and language.
Prof Alan Riach, also of Glasgow University, continues by underlining how important a perspective on language – Scots, Gaelic and English – is to understanding the context and scope of Scottish literature. Again, trainee teachers often have little exposure to Scottish language or its literature.
There is a playlist for the other talks on the conference, listed above.