As we begin the new half-term, students in Years 7, 8 and 9 have been celebrating English Martyrs' International Week.
Monday began with Year 8 X Band who have learnt about how Modern Languages can be extremely useful in the workplace, having heard testimonies from people who have used their language skills as part of their careers. This included a Games Tester who used French and Spanish, and a French speaker working for NATO.
Year 8 have also looked at Language in the context of Philosophy and what Wittgenstein meant by “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”. We discussed how cultural differences can affect our language and how cultural understanding helps us to communicate better with others. In their final session, Year 8 learned about the Francophone world and French as a global language, spoken as an official language on five continents.
Today (Tuesday), Year 7 have also been learning about the Francophony – with 300 million speakers around the world. They also learned about a French and Italian influenced style of poetry, looking at Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘Caligrams’ and created their own Caligrams using some poetry from our school Library.
They also looked at some international storytelling, using French American author Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s ‘Little Prince’ – the most translated French story, and applying it to the different writing styles of surrealist, Raymond Quesneau.
Tomorrow (Wednesday) begins the first of Year 9’s International Mornings, with a look at how we can learn languages independently, looking at Greek, German, Portuguese, Dutch and Norwegian.