As I am currently working outwith a school setting, I have not been able to trial this activity directly with learners. I have instead used the application task to consider how the learning from this unit informs my current work on the Curriculum Improvement Cycle (CIC), particularly the development of the curriculum for Scots (Learners).

I planned an S2/S3 activity exploring Scots alongside German, Dutch and Scandinavian languages. Learners would begin with forms such as hoose, moose, nicht, licht and stane and compare these with related forms in other Germanic languages. The intention would be to develop awareness of Scots as a language with its own history while drawing on approaches familiar from Modern Languages: recognising cognates, identifying patterns and using existing linguistic knowledge to understand unfamiliar language.

One challenge in planning the activity was avoiding an overly simplistic message that similar-looking words must have been borrowed directly from one language to another. I would want learners to begin distinguishing between shared linguistic ancestry and later language contact. Finnish and Gaelic provide useful comparisons because they belong to different language groups and demonstrate that geographical proximity does not necessarily mean that languages are closely related.

This has direct relevance to my CIC work. Developing Scots (Learners) has made me think carefully about what progression in learning a language looks like when that language may already form part of a learner’s linguistic repertoire. Some learners may use Scots confidently at home or in their community, others may understand considerably more than they use, while some may be encountering Scots as a language of learning for the first time. This makes the distinction between receptive and productive language particularly important.

The unit has also reinforced for me that a Scots curriculum should not be reduced to vocabulary lists, literature or heritage. Looking at Scots through a language-learning lens opens up a much wider range of learning. For patterns and structures, learners might notice recurring features such as A am/A hae, or negative forms such as canna, didna and wisna, and begin to apply familiar patterns in new contexts rather than learning individual words in isolation.

For pronunciation and writing systems, forms such as nicht, richt and licht provide opportunities to explore relationships between spoken and written Scots and to notice recurring features. This also needs to recognise regional variation. A national framework needs enough commonality to support progression without suggesting that there is one variety of Scots against which others should be measured.

Language-learning strategies might involve using context, cognates and previously encountered language to make sense of unfamiliar Scots. Comparing hoose/Haus/huis or stane/Stein/steen provides an obvious starting point. Learners could predict meaning, explain the clues they used and then check their thinking using a dictionary. This develops the same kind of independence I would encourage when learning another language.

There is also a wider cultural dimension. Identity and belonging could involve learners exploring Scots used within their own families and communities and comparing this with varieties used elsewhere in Scotland, without positioning one as more authentic than another. Perspectives and worldviews could include examining why forms such as hoose may be linguistically systematic but have acquired different social associations from house. This begins to open discussion about how the status attached to languages and varieties is shaped socially as well as linguistically.

The range of sources across this unit has also made me think about breadth of experience. Scots has been encountered through historical government and legislation, poetry, personal testimony, political discussion and human rights. If learners encounter Scots only through Burns, historical texts or informal speech, there is a risk of presenting too narrow a picture of what the language is and where it can be used.

Although I cannot evaluate the activity through classroom application at present, I can apply this learning directly to curriculum design. It has helped me consider whether the Scots (Learners) framework we are developing provides opportunities not simply to encounter Scots, but to understand how it works, use it with increasing confidence and make connections across languages. For the CIC work, this has reinforced the importance of breadth: progression should extend what learners can understand, use and know about Scots, while recognising the different linguistic knowledge and experience they already bring.