Modern Languages Blog

This competition is supported by the HSBC Global Education Programme and organised by the British Council to support and promote the teaching of Chinese as a modern foreign language in UK schools.

Regional heats will be held in London and Newcastle in mid December 2009 and successful competitors will be invited to the competition final at the British Museum in March 2010. The winning prize is a trip to Beijing in April 2010.

Interested schools should complete the online registration form at https://survey.britishcouncil.org/wix/p9070429.aspx by Friday 23 October 2009. 

More information on the competition and the judging criteria can be found on the British Council website: http://www.britishcouncil.org/schoolpartnerships-chinese-speaking-competition.htm

If your school has been working with e-Assessment over the last academic year, then why not submit an entry to the Scottish e-Assessment Awards?

Organised into the following categories, the Awards cover:

• Formative e-Assessment
• Summative e-Assessment
• e-Portfolio/ePDP
• Mobile e-Assessment
• e-Assessment Administration

To submit an entry, just send a completed application form to SeAA@rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk by 10 September, 2009

From CILT:

UK winners of this year’s European Award for Languages have shown that language teachers are increasingly looking outside of the language department for ways to motivate young learners. Winning projects made innovative cross-curricular links with departments including Drama, geography, history and citizenship to show students the relevance of languages to all aspects of life. Read more…

CILT, the National Centre for Languages has just launched the next Languages and Film Talent Awards (LAFTAs) competition, which offers the perfect chance for you to test your creativity and have some fun with languages.
The LAFTAs is a national competition inviting 13-21 year olds to make short films about the importance of languages.

Find out more and how to enter the competition from:

http://www.languageswork.org.uk/laftas/

Turismo Valencia has just launched an exciting competition  for 14-18 year-old students of Spanish in the UK. Three students will win a football course run by Valencia FC Foundation in early July with the chance to meet team players and train alongside their promising youngsters.

To take part in the competition you should enrol on the Destination Valencia website and create an advert for the city of Valencia – the proposal must be in Spanish and is limited to one entry per student. For more information email Manuel Balaguer Carmona  asesoriaedimburgo.uk@educacion.es 

http://www.destinovalencia.com/uk09/destino-valencia.php?

A team at Millburn Academy in Inverness has won the UK level of the ‘Charlemagne Youth Prize’.

Read more on the LTS International education blog

 http://ltsblogs.org.uk/internationaleducation/2009/03/25/europe-and-the-charlemagne-youth-prize/

Shawlands Academy cooked up a winning entry at a recent competition for schools in Glasgow aimed at getting pupils actively learning about employability and enterprise skills through the use of modern languages.

The Glasgow International Job Centre competition set pupils aged 14 from eleven secondary schools the task of investigating and gathering all the information needed to recruit someone for a job in another country – a task made more difficult by the fact they had to do all of it in the language of their chosen country.

Read more of this article from the British Council

The Spanish Education Office is launching a contest open to all primary and secondary schools in Scotland to give recognition to those schools that excel in the promotion and provision of the teaching of Spanish within the school. Entries must be submitted by the headship team or modern languages coordinators before April 20 2009. All the information about prizes and criteria to be awarded can be seen on The Consejería web page:

http://www.mepsyd.es/exterior/uk/es/consej/es/promocion/concursos.shtml

All Scottish primary schools are invited to join the Junior Language Challenge, the only national language-learning competition of its kind in the UK.
The JLC was started six years ago with the aim of encouraging children under the age of 11 to develop a lifelong passion for language learning, by using cutting-edge multimedia software to learn up to three foreign languages as they compete against schools from all over the country.

The competition is organised and run by modern languages publisher EuroTalk Ltd and this is what it offers:

- a fun, interesting way to give children a headstart in language learning

- the chance to offer a new language (one you wouldn’t already be teaching) (and EuroTalk say it won’t be a drain on time as they take responsibilty for organising everything)

- because of the way the software is designed, teachers need no previous knowledge of the languages used

- great prizes for everyone

There is a nominal competition fee of £2.50 per child. These monies go entirely to an educational charity supported by EuroTalk. Each year the winner of the competition visits Africa to inaugurate a classroom purchased with the competition fees.

If you’re interested, there are full details and an online application form on the EuroTalk website.

The British Council reports: Two Scottish primary schools have reached the finals of the eTwinning European Prize Awards to be held in Prague later this month.Bowhouse Primary school in Falkirk and Cauldeen Primary school in Inverness have made it through to the finals for their projects exploring new and exciting ways of introducing mathematics to pupils.

Both schools hope they can progress further and win the award which includes a visit to an eTwinning Camp for teachers and pupils in April 2009.

Find out more about eTwinning project and also Comenius School Partnership.