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Ryde High School, Isle of Wight |
Vocational |
Your Future in Languages event 2006
This event was held on 22nd February 2006 at Winchester House YMCA Centre, Shanklin and is planned to be repeated in February 2007 at the Ryde Castle Hotel in Ryde.
The event aims at year 11 able linguists across the Isle of Wight who may be considering pursuing their language studies post 16 but are not convinced that it is the right decision for them. It is sponsored by Aimhigher and Ryde High School Language College. 31 year 11 students and their tutors attended and participated in a range of workshops which had been designed to convince them of the importance of continuing with their language studies. These were as follows:
- Construct a wind turbine – Students were issued with instructions in various languages on how to make a mini wind turbine out of a set of resources. The students were fascinated with this task which was designed by Gurit, who produce composite materials for a range of industries and aimed to show them how they can achieve a lot with only a little knowledge of the language.
- Synthetic Language – Another Gurit workshop, this aimed at showing students how frustrating it is when you receive correspondence which you cannot understand. Students were given a piece of correspondence written in code and the code to decipher it. They found this task frustrating but very worthwhile.
- Writing a business letter – This workshop was run by Colas Ltd and Portsmouth City Council with native French and Spanish speakers instructing students on how different business communication is from what they learn in school.
We also had speakers from Osborne House and Gurit explaining how languages are used in the workplace and from Southampton University talking about what the year abroad is like if you study a language degree. We also received letters from the Prime Minister and Richard Branson complimenting us on our goal and supporting the need for young people to study languages for business.
Half of those students who had said they were unsure about continuing with their language studies were now convinced they wanted to do so and all of those who had opted to continue were more convinced that they had made the right decision. Two students had said they were not going to study languages and one of those has now changed their mind.
Pat Suttmann, Ryde High School, January 2007
