Languages on the Move - a visit to St Peter’s School, Guildford on 7 March 2012

Tuesday 20 March 2012

A School of English and Languages delegation consisted of Liz Avis (Co-ordinator, driver), Catherine Slater (Presenter) and Ako Danes (Japanese language taster tutor).

We offered a Languages on the Move event to a number of local state schools and St Peter’s school was quick to respond and accept.   
This was originally offered as a trip to one class of pupils (around 30) divided into two for a 30 minute talk and 30 minute taster for each group.  The school would have liked us to take a group of 100 pupils but we had to decline as the groups would have been too large particularly for the language taster.   In the end, those from the Year 9 year group were invited who were particularly keen on taking a language at GCSE.  There were 31 pupils in all.

St Peter’s offers French and German at GCSE (not Spanish) and would be interested in taking a student or two from our Languages in Education module in the future.

The sessions were introduced as a condensed version of our Languages Days, but with us going out to schools rather than them coming to us at the University. The sessions went well with the pupils changing around at half time.  Feedback was very positive from the teachers and pupils and, as with our Languages Days, the pupils tended to prefer the language taster to the talk.

This event was made possible with funding from Outreach and it is hoped to carry out another one like this in the future as well as a 6th form event in the winter.