Leicester City Languages Blog: June 2011

Raising intercultural awareness and understanding

The key aim of our project was to explore ways of delivering language at Key Stage 3 in a richer cultural context to enable language learning to become more motivating and engaging for our students. We hoped to help students appreciate the richness and diversity of other cultures and to deepen their understanding of a range of intercultural themes. We felt that this strand of the renewed Key Stage 3 framework was still largely undeveloped in many schools and perhaps only touched on in a superficial way. This view was confirmed recently by the Ofsted report published in January 2011 on Modern languages “Achievement and challenge 2007-2010”, which states that pupil’s intercultural understanding “...was weak in the majority of the schools visited because they did not have good opportunities to develop it”.

We wanted to create a bank of stimulating and exciting resources to engage and inspire learners. We also aimed to develop a range of teaching and learning strategies which could be trialled in a variety of different local schools. Seven city secondary schools took part in the project, ranging from a Specialist Language College where all pupils study a language at KS4 to three project partner schools where the uptake at Key Stage 4 is currently below 10%. It was hoped that we could provide a variety of different models for incorporating intercultural understanding into the Key Stage 3 Scheme of Work.

We also hoped to develop students’ thinking skills by creating a range of opportunities for them to study aspects of different cultures in greater depth for example by investigating, by comparing and contrasting, by looking at changes over time and by exploring different interests, opinions and beliefs.

Finally, we wanted to foster links with other areas of the curriculum in order to broaden the context in which students learn.

The 7 Leicester City schools which took part in the project were:

Babington Community Technology College

Beaumont Leys

Fullhurst

Judgemeadow Specialist Language College

Moat Community College

Rushey Mead School

Soar Valley College

My thanks go to Sue Boda, Jamie James, Pepita Rodriguez-Dixon, Jane Facer, Kirsty Abercrombie, Sonya Grant, Gemma Needham and Lesley Sunderland for all their commitment and hard work during the project.

Below are the main resources from the project.

Hope you find them useful!

Project 1: La santé: Year 9

Judgemeadow Specialist Language College

Enriching a current Scheme of Work

Lower Ability Group

Download Haiti-easier version

Download Les galettes de boue

Download Haiti phrases utiles

Download Evaluation and reflection of first 3 lessons

Download Haiti - collective memory

Download Compare and contrast