Time is fast approaching for our annual Langauges Work seminar. This time it's the turn of the S4's to reflect on the study of languages and it's place in society.
We won a CiLT award for this in 2004 which was presented by Sir Trevor MacDonald down in London. As you can imagine it gets harder each year to think of a new focus, although last year was nice because we did it for the P7's in our feeder primaries. The highlight of this was a new language challenge where students were challenged to "learn" a new language in 30 minutes. Not only were French, German and Spanish on offer, but we had some of our own pupils teaching Turkish, Welsh and Dutch we even had one group learning Boulou, a language from Cameroon (thanks to my wife). All in all it went down very well.
Now for this year. We have been racking our brains for a focus but we think we have found, with no small help from our first minister Mr McConell (former Maths teacher). This is the plan. Via a carefully scripted debate we will present all the usual rubbish spouted as reasons for not learning a language in school, making sure these ideas are presented totally without subtlety. We will then challenge the students to counter these with their own pro arguments in as creative a manner as possible...podcast, video, drama, song etc.
So dear blog readers, any thoughts, ideas etc.
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