On Friday 24 September, to coincide with celebrations for European Day of Languages, Year 9 students at the Heart of England School in Balsall Common combined language knowledge with the power of persuasion to encourage local business people to learn languages.

In a workshop led by Business Language Champion, Dr Matthew Finch from PMD Magnetics, students were given plenty of food for thought including why languages are useful at work, when travelling and for not getting lost when abroad!  They were then tasked with creating posters to encourage local business people to learn languages not only to give their company a better chance of overseas success but also to improve their own skill set.

The room was buzzing as the whole of Year 9 were split into two halves so they could all take part in one of the hour-long workshops.

Students listened avidly to Matthew’s experiences of learning and using languages and soon got down to work to produce fantastically colourful and eye-catching posters with plenty of language skills on show!

At the end of each session, the posters were collected and adjudicated by Matthew and the winning teams went home with a goody bag, courtesy of PMD Magnetics, which included a USB memory stick, CDs, cards and keyrings.

Student Lee Wellman was surprised but elated to be part of the first winning team:

“My group, which is in Set 4, came first and that shocked us all that we had won.  I think it was our catchy slogan that clinched it for us:

It doesn’t matter what you look like,

It doesn’t matter who you are,

All you need is a bit of language,

Then you can go really far!”

Fellow student Joe Burgess added:

“The talk with Matthew Finch helped me because I learnt that if you just say one word in a different language it can change everything.  Also because I learnt how important it is to learn languages because it can get you a much better job.  It was also shocking to learn the statistics of how many companies could not answer the phone in a different language.”

And Nina Kaur summed up the event when she said that:

“Overall, it was great fun and opened my eyes and made me think about taking languages for my GCSE and not just to drop it.”

For more information on the Business Language Champions programme in the West Midlands please visit the RLN West Midlands website.

Pictured:  students working on their posters to promote language learning to business people (top) and Matthew Finch supporting students in their BLC workshop task (bottom).