Getting creative with languages

The annual School of Education multilingual literature, poetry and song competition for pupils in our Initial Teacher Education (ITE) partnership of schools is in its tenth year. The competition provides a valuable opportunity for pupils learning languages to draw on their diverse linguistic repertoires to get creative with languages.

Pupils write and illustrate their own poems, compose and translate songs, record their own homemade videos in different languages, create stop frame animations with voice overs, write short stories and give live performances of songs and tongue twisters in a diverse range of languages. The quality of the work is a testament to the commitment and dedication of local language teachers who encourage and provide their students with opportunities to apply their language learning skills in meaningful contexts and produce tangible outcomes.

Our PGCE modern languages beginning teachers created some outstanding multimodal sequences of lessons drawing on a range of authentic sources to support pupils participating in the competition. The overall competition winner was Christ the King Catholic Voluntary Academy where the competition was led by PGCE modern languages student Eleanor Curtis supported by her languages mentor, Kim Fallon  who completed her modern languages PGCE with us in 2020.