Hiya aw,

A'm fair chuffed tae meet all o' yees an excited tae work wi yees on this fifth presentation o' oor teacher CPD in the Scots leid.

I work for the Open University in Scotland and in my capacity as Associate Head of our School of Languages and Applied Linguistics, I developed the course together with Bruce from Education Scotland and our consultant authors whom you'll meet when studying the different units.

I'm originally from the small village Lostau in East Germany. After the fall of the Wall, I came to Glasgow in 1995 and have since worked in teaching and promoting Languages in Scotland with the Universities of Strathclyde (Jordanhill College), Stirling, Heriot Watt and the OU as well as the Goethe Institut in Glasgow. 

Here are two pictures of my village located right at the river Elbe near Magdeburg. By the way, it is a very old place, with lots of Slavic influences from tribes moving to what is known as Germany today from the East ... the church was built in 1050! 

And where does my interest in Scots come from? It's a long story... I am a linguist with a passion for indigenous languages, which stems from my childhood, and my linguistic identity reminds me of that of many people speaking a dialect of Scots in Scotland. My grandpa was the headteacher of our village primary school... and I remember that he kept telling me and my peers off for speaking our local dialect belonging to the Brandenburg dialects, which in turn are part of the northern-German non-standard language variety called Plattdeutsch, a real mix of German and English with a lot of the vocabulary closely related to Scots. He used to tell us that we would ruin our career opportunities if we spoke this dialect and instead had to make an effort speaking Hochdeutsch - high German. If you have a look at the table listing the numbers of self-reported speakers of Plattdeutsch, you'll see that only 11% of people in my federal state Saxony-Anhalt self-report as speaking the language well or very well... sounding like a familiar story?

I'm a learner of Scots and am working on building my confidence in writing and speaking it with native speakers. And I'm excited that I now supervise a PhD student who is undertaking the first ever study of adult learners of Scots. You'll find out more about her work in Unit 1.

Well, you'll learn much more about the linguistic identities and histories of Scots speakers in this course and their connections with speakers in other parts of northern Europe - we very much hope that you'll feel inspired to support the use of Scots through your classroom practice.

I'm looking forward to reading your introductions now. So, please share with us all what brought you here and what you're looking to get out of studying this course.

Sylvia