Cindy Hello, Brindall’s Estate Agents here.

Cindy How may I help you?

Martin Oh, good morning, I’m ringing to see what flats you have for rent at the moment.

Cindy Right.

Cindy Can I start by just taking your name Mr em …

Martin Hill, Martin Hill.

Cindy Right, and are you looking for a flat for yourself or … em … a family perhaps?

Martin Well it’s for three of us: myself and two friends – we’re going to share together.

Cindy I see … erm, what about employment – are you all students?

Martin Oh no, we’ve all got full-time jobs – two of us work in the Central Bank, that’s Chris and me, and Phil – that’s the other one – is working for Hallam cars, you know, at the factory about two miles out of town?

Cindy I’ll put you down as young professionals, then – and I suppose you’ll be looking for somewhere with three bedrooms?

Martin Yeah – at least three.

Martin But actually, we’d rather have a fourth room as well – if we can afford it – for friends staying over and stuff.

Cindy Is that with a living room to share?

Cindy Plus kitchen and bathroom?

Martin Yeah, that sounds good.

Martin But we must have a bathroom with a shower.

Martin We don’t mind about having a bath, but the shower’s crucial.

Cindy OK, I’ll just key that in …

Cindy And, are you interested in any particular area?

Martin Well, the city centre would be good for me and Chris, so that’s our first preference … but we’d consider anything in the west suburbs as well really – actually for Phil that’d be better, but he knows he’s outnumbered!

Martin But we aren’t interested in the north or the east of the city.

Cindy OK, I’m just getting up all the flats on our books. …

Cindy Just looking at this list here, I’m afraid there are only two that might interest you … do you want the details?

Martin OK, let me just grab a pen and some paper … fire away!

Cindy This first one I’m looking at is in Bridge Street – and very close to the bus station.

Cindy It’s not often that flats in that area come up for rent.

Cindy This one’s got three bedrooms, a bathroom and kitchen, of course … and a very big living room.

Cindy That sounds a good size for you.

Martin Mmmm …

Martin So, what about the rent?

Martin How much is it a month?

Cindy The good news is that it’s only four hundred and fifty pounds a month.

Cindy Rents in that area usually reach up to six fifty a month, but the landlord obviously wants to get a tenant quickly.

Martin Yeah, it sounds like a bit of a bargain.

Martin What about transport for Phil?

Cindy Yeah, there’ll be plenty of buses – so no problem for him to use public transport … er… but unfortunately there isn’t a shower in the flat, and that location is likely to be noisy, of course …

Martin OK – what about the other place?

Cindy Let’s see … oh yes, well this one is in a really nice location – on Hills Avenue.

Cindy I’m sure you know it.

Cindy This looks like something a bit special.

Cindy It’s got four big bedrooms and erm, there’s a big living room and … oh, this will be good for you: a dining room.

Cindy It sounds enormous, doesn’t it?

Martin Yeah, it sounds great!

Cindy That whole area’s being developed, and the flat’s very modern, which I’m sure you’ll like.

Cindy It’s got good facilities, including your shower.

Cindy And of course it’s going to be quiet, especially compared with the other place.

Martin Better and better … but I’ll bet it’s expensive, especially if it’s in that trendy area beside the park.

Cindy Hmm, I’m afraid so.

Cindy They’re asking £800 a month for it.

Martin Wow!

Martin It sounds a lot more than we can afford.

Cindy Well, maybe you could get somebody else to move in too?

Cindy I’ll tell you what, give me your address and I can send you all the details and photos and you can see whether these two are worth a visit.

Martin Thanks, that would be really helpful … my address is …

Speaker Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to your very own tour of the British Library on this lovely afternoon.

Speaker My name is Tony Walters and I’m your guide for today.

Speaker Could I please see your tickets for the guided tour?

Speaker I’d also like to remind you that any tickets bought today do not include a visit to the reading rooms.

Speaker I’m afraid we don’t do visits on Sundays – or any weekday during working hours, so as not to disturb the readers.

Speaker But if you do want to see those rooms, the only day there are tours is on Sundays.

Speaker So, I don’t want anyone to be disappointed about that today. OK? Thank you. Right.

Speaker We’ll start with a brief introduction.

Speaker As many of you know, this is the United Kingdom’s National Library and you can see that this is a magnificent modern building.

Speaker It was first designed by Sir Colin St John Wilson in 1977, and inaugurated by Her Majesty the Queen more than twenty years later, in 1998.

Speaker As you can see, the size is immense and the basements alone have 300 kilometres of shelving – and that’s enough to hold about 12 million books.

Speaker The total floor space here is 100,000 square metres and, as I’ll show you, the library houses a huge range of facilities and exhibition spaces, and it has a thousand staff members based here in the building – so, you can appreciate the scale of our operation.

Speaker In fact, this was the biggest publicly-funded building constructed in the United Kingdom last century.

Speaker It is still funded by the government as a national institution, of course, and it houses one of the most important collections in the world.

Speaker The different items come from every continent and span almost 3000 years.

Speaker The library isn’t a public library, though – you can’t just come in and join and borrow any of the books.

Speaker Access to the collections is limited to those involved in carrying out research – so, it’s really a huge reference library for that purpose, and anyone who wants to consult any materials that are kept here can formally apply to use the library reading rooms.

Speaker Right, well, here we are, standing at the Meeting Point on the lower ground floor just to the right of the Main Entrance.

Speaker I’ve given you all a plan of the building so that we can orientate ourselves and get an idea of where we’ll be going.

Speaker Now, outside the Main Entrance you’ll see the wide Piazza with the stunning sculpture of Newton.

Speaker The sculptor was Paolozzi, but it’s based on the famous image by William Blake – and it’s definitely worth a closer look.

Speaker On the other side of the Piazza from the statue is the Conference Centre, which is used for all kinds of international conventions – we’ll take a quick look inside at the end of our tour.

Speaker Looking ahead of us now, you’ll see that we’re standing opposite the staircase down to the basement where you’ll find the cloakroom, and to the left of that, we have the information desk where you can find out about any current exhibitions, the times of the tours and anything you need to know – if you don’t have a tour guide.

Speaker As you can see, on this lower ground floor we also have a bookshop – that’s the area over to the left of the main entrance.

Speaker You’ll be free to browse there when we get back to the ground floor.

Speaker Now, opposite the main entrance on this floor we have the open stairs leading up to the upper ground floor.

Speaker And at the top of them, in the middle of the upper ground floor, you can see a kind of glass-sided tower that rises all the way up through the ceiling and up to the first floor.

Speaker This is called the King’s Library.

Speaker It’s really the heart of the building.

Speaker It was built to house the collection that was presented to the nation in 1823 by the King.

Speaker You can see it from every floor above ground.

Speaker When we go up there, you’ll find the library’s Treasures Gallery on the left.

Speaker Can you find it on your plan?

Speaker That’s the exciting one, so we’ll be visiting that first, but we’ll also take a look at the stamp display situated behind it, on the way to the café – a lot of people miss that.

Speaker The Cafeteria runs along the back of the floor and, in the right-hand corner you’ll find the lifts and toilets … ha, always good to locate them. …

Speaker The other main area on that floor is the Public Access Catalogue section and I’ll show you how that operates when we get up there …

Dr Green Good afternoon, Dave, come on in and take a seat.

Dave Hi, Dr Green … thanks.

Dr Green Hang on a minute, I’ll just find the first draft of your project paper and we can have a look at it together.

Dr Green Now yours is the one on Work Placement, isn’t it?

Dave Yeah, that’s right.

Dr Green So what made you choose that for your project?

Dave Well, I suppose it was because sending students off to various companies for work experience seems to be such a typical part of educational courses these days – I mean, even school kids get to do it.

Dave But, I felt everyone just kind of assumes it’s a good thing … and I guess I wanted to find out if that’s the case.

Dr Green But you don’t look at schools or colleges, right?

Dr Green You’ve stuck to university placement schemes.

Dave Yeah, well, I quickly found that I had to limit my research, otherwise the area was just too big.

Dave Do you think that was OK?

Dr Green I think it’s very sensible, especially as the objectives might be very different.

Dr Green So how many schemes did you look at?

Dave Well, I sent out about 150 questionnaires altogether – you know, 50 of each to university authorities, students and companies, and I got responses from 15 educational institutions, and, er, 30 students in 11 individual companies.

Dr Green Great, that sounds like a good sample.

Dr Green And who did you send your company questionnaires to?

Dave Well, the idea was to have them done by the students’ Line Managers, but sometimes they were filled in by the Human Resources manager or even the owner of the company.

Dr Green Right.

Dr Green I didn’t find a full list anywhere, so I think it’s very important to provide that, really.

Dr Green You can put it as an appendix at the back.

Dave Right, I’ve got a record of all the respondents so that’ll be easy.

Dave I hope other things were OK.

Dave I mean, I’ve already put such a lot of work into this project, identifying the companies and so on.

Dr Green Oh, I can tell …

Dr Green I think you’ve done a good job overall.

Dr Green I thought your questionnaires were excellent, and you’d obviously done lots of background reading, but there were a few problems with the introduction …

Dr Green First of all, I think you need to make some slight changes to the organisation of your information there, at present it’s a bit confused.

Dave OK.

Dave What did you have in mind?

Dr Green Well, you write quite a bit about Work Placement in general, but you never explain what you mean by the term.

Dave So you think I should give a definition?

Dr Green Exactly.

Dr Green And the introduction is the place to do it.

Dr Green And then … look, you start talking about what’s been written on the topic – but it’s all a bit mixed up with your own project.

Dave So, do you think it would be better to have two sections there – like, a survey of the literature as the introduction … and then a separate section on the aims of my research?

Dr Green I do.

Dr Green You can include your methods for collecting data in the second section too.

Dr Green It would be much clearer for your reader … you know, establish the background first, then how your work relates to it … it would flow quite nicely then.

Dave Yes, I see what you mean.

Dr Green Anyway, moving on …

Dr Green I like the way you’ve grouped your findings into three main topic areas.

Dave Well, it became very obvious from the questionnaires that the preparation stage was really important for the whole scheme to work.

Dave So I had to look at that first.

Dave And I found a huge variation between the different institutions, as you saw.

Dr Green I was wondering if you could give a summary at the end of this stage of what you consider to be the best practice you found …

Dr Green I think that would be very helpful …

Dave Right, I’ll just make a note of that.

Dave What did you think of my second set of findings – on Key Skills development?

Dave For me, this is the core of my whole project really …

Dr Green And you’ve handled it very well.

Dr Green I wouldn’t want you to make any changes – you’ve already got a nice final focus on good practice there.

Dave Thanks.

Dr Green Right, now I think the last part, which deals with the reasons why students don’t learn …

Dave What?

Dave The constraints on learning chapter?

Dr Green Yes, that’s the one – I think you need to refer to the evidence from your research a bit more closely here.

Dr Green You know, maybe you could illustrate it with quotations from the questionnaires, or even use any extracts from a student ‘diary’ if you can.

Dr Green And refer back to what you’ve written about good practice …

Speaker When we look at theories of education and learning we see a constant shifting of views as established theories are questioned and refined or even replaced, and we can see this very clearly in the way that attitudes towards bilingualism have changed.

Speaker Let’s start with a definition of bilingualism, and for our purposes today, we can say it’s the ability to communicate with the same degree of proficiency in at least two languages.

Speaker Now, in practical terms this might seem like a good thing – something we’d all like to be able to do.

Speaker However, early research done with children in the USA in fact suggested that being bilingual interfered in some way with learning and with the development of their mental processes, and so in those days bilingualism was regarded as something to be avoided, and parents were encouraged to bring their children up as monolingual – just speaking one language.

Speaker But this research, which took place in the early part of the twentieth century, is now regarded as unsound for various reasons, mainly because it didn’t take into account other factors such as the children’s social and economic backgrounds.

Speaker Now, in our last lecture we were looking at some of the research that’s been done into the way children learn, into their cognitive development, and in fact we believe now that the relationship between bilingualism and cognitive development is actually a positive one – it turns out that cognitive skills such as problem solving, which don’t seem at first glance to have anything to do with how many languages you speak, are better among bilingual children than monolingual ones.

Speaker And quite recently there’s been some very interesting work done by Ellen Bialystok at York University in Canada, she’s done various studies on the effects of bilingualism and her findings provide some evidence that they might apply to adults as well, they’re not just restricted to children.

Speaker So how do you go about investigating something like this?

Speaker Well, Dr Bialystok used groups of monolingual and bilingual subjects, aged from 30 right up to 88.

Speaker For one experiment, she used a computer program which displayed either a red or a blue square on the screen.

Speaker The coloured square could come up on either the left-hand or the right-hand side of the screen.

Speaker If the square was blue, the subject had to press the left ‘shift’ key on the keyboard and if the square was red they had to press the right shift key.

Speaker So they didn’t have to react at all to the actual position of the square on the screen, just to the colour they saw.

Speaker And she measured the subjects’ reaction times by recording how long it took them to press the shift key, and how often they got it right.

Speaker What she was particularly interested in was whether it took the subject longer to react when a square lit up on one side of the screen – say the left, and the subject had to press the shift key on the right-hand side.

Speaker She’d expected that it would take more processing time than if a square lit up on the left and the candidates had to press a left key.

Speaker This was because of a phenomenon known as the ‘Simon effect’, where, basically the brain gets a bit confused because of conflicting demands being made on it – in this case seeing something on the right, and having to react on the left – and this causes a person’s reaction times to slow down.

Speaker The results of the experiment showed that the bilingual subjects responded more quickly than the monolingual ones.

Speaker That was true both when the squares were on the ‘correct’ side of the screen, so to speak, and – even more so – when they were not.

Speaker So, bilingual people were better able to deal with the Simon effect than the monolingual ones.

Speaker So, what’s the explanation for this?

Speaker Well, the result of the experiment suggests that bilingual people are better at ignoring information which is irrelevant to the task in hand and just concentrating on what’s important.

Speaker One suggestion given by Dr Bialystok was that it might be because someone who speaks two languages can suppress the activity of parts of the brain when it isn’t needed – in particular, the part that processes whichever language isn’t being used at that particular time.

Speaker Well, she then went on to investigate that with a second experiment, but again the bilingual group performed better, and what was particularly interesting, and this is I think why the experiments have received so much publicity, is that in all cases, the performance gap between monolinguals and bilinguals actually increased with age – which suggests that bilingualism protects the mind against decline, in some way the life-long experience of managing two languages may prevent some of the negative effects of aging.

Speaker So that’s a very different story from the early research.

Speaker So what are the implications of this for education …