Radio Lingua Network News: 18 Sep 2007

This is Mark from the Radio Lingua Network and I'm here to bring you some of the latest news about our language-learning materials. It's been a while since we released a CBS news podcast, and there's just so much happening just now we thought it was time to add this news podcast to all our feeds to bring you the latest information. This news programme will be added to all our podcast feeds to make sure everyone hears about what's happening, regardless of which language you're learning with us. There's also another reason why we wanted to release the news podcast today, but more about that in just a moment!

First up today is the news that Coffee Break Spanish has won a European Award for Languages. The award recognises "creative ways to improve the quality of language teaching, motivate students and make the best of available resources". It's a Europe-wide initiative supported by the European Commission. The UK co-ordinator of the initiative is CILT, the National Centre for Languages. In total 15 initiatives were recognised involving language-learners of all ages. According to the judges, "the success of Coffee Break Spanish across the world shows that podcasting can promote language awareness and competence regardless of geographical location". Kara and I will be at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff on 20 November to accept the award. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their support of Coffee Break Spanish, and we're looking forward to the new season beginning in a few weeks. All the Coffee Break Spanish news can be found at www.coffeebreakspanish.com

Final preparations are underway for our launch of Coffee Break French next week. The French team is heading out to Paris this weekend in preparation for the launch. The Coffee Break French feed is already live and you can subscribe to it in iTunes or via the website. Prior to the launch we've been releasing promo shows about Coffee Break French and there will be another one of these later this week explaining what the course will involve. Coffee Break French goes live at 18h00 on Wednesday 26th September when we'll launch with a video introduction from Paris. While in Paris we'll also be working on something else, but at this stage we'll have to keep that top secret! More information in the coming months!

We're going to be making some changes with the Coffee Break Spanish premium service. Within the next couple of weeks we're going to be introducing a new way of accessing the premium materials, rather than using the subscription method. Current subscriptions will remain in place, and it will still be possible to sign up for 3 month subscriptions, but the new store which is currently in development will allow listeners to purchase whole units for one-off costs. We'll be able to accept payment by credit card rather than Paypal only, so hopefully this will be good news for many of you. The same system will be used for our other podcasts.

Now for a quick roundup of where we are with our podcasts. CBS episode 40 is about to be released and features a discussion about languages and language-learning in Spain. There's even some Catalan thrown in in this week's show. We'll be taking a couple of weeks off with CBS while we launch CBF, but we'll be back with unit 5 in early October. MDPG is about to finish. We're going to be releasing the final materials in this series in the next few days. Our plans are to remove all the content of MDPG and MDPI from the feeds in November and then start the courses again with some updated extra materials. Many listeners have been asking us about higher level Italian and German courses. We'll be introducing a new German course in the winter and we're currently planning more Italian content for early 2008. We'll take this opportunity to mention that we're also developing short courses in other languages including Polish and Norwegian. These will be made available over the coming months and you'll hear more about them in future news podcasts.

And finally... if any Scottish educators are heading to the Scottish Learning Festival this week then do come along to the Apple stand where I'm going to be demonstrating podcasting along with Kara. The Scottish Learning Festival is a major event in the educational calendar in the UK welcoming tens of thousands of educationalists from across Europe. Find out more at www.ltscotland.org.uk/slf. You can also subscribe to the SLF Connected Live podcast in iTunes.

And that's it for this edition of Radio Lingua News. We'll be back in a couple of weeks after the launch of CBF. In the meantime, thanks for listening.