On Wednesday 27th October, Y9 celebrated an International Day, focusing on International Relations. Students learned about how languages teach valuable communication skills for the workplace and heard testimonies from people who use languages in their various careers.

Afterwards, there were language-learning workshops where students learned different approaches to independent language learning. They used alphabet guides, dictionaries, language learning apps and even Disney to help them to access texts in Greek, German, Dutch and Portuguese and discussed the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. This led to a series of cultural workshops, including Ancient Greek Philosophy, traditional German fairytales, Vincent Van Gogh and Futebol, Fado and Fatima!

In the final session, students planned presentations to introduce international students to the English Martyrs’ School community. Each tutor group voted for their best presentations and one group from each tutor group will record their presentation to be listened to by students from our partner schools in Crete, Germany, Portugal and Netherlands. For more information about this, find out about our new Erasmus+ project!

Student quotations:

“I enjoyed the problem-solving of translation and catching some of the words”

“I was interested in finding out about Gaming developers and how they translate subtitles”

“Languages can introduce you to so many opportunities”

“I enjoyed learning about different cultures and their languages”