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).