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I agree with Gisela's point about the need 'to rebuild essential substructures'. We simply have neither the primary school teachers with the necessary linguistic skills nor the linguists with the primary teaching skills. In the past I have advocated - to little or no avail - that we should employ native speaker primary school teachers of the required languages (French, German, Spanish, Italian and/or Japanese, Mandarin etc) and train them to teach their mother tongue. This would be a cost-efficient and productive way of providing language skills to our primary school pupils. The problem would then be - as we have seen in the past - the need to build on these skills in the secondary schools. We have a long way to go before success can be achieved. Paul Coggle