Project leader: Fi Cotton (MFL Consultant, Solihull Local Authority)

Key areas of work

La Lengua de las Mariposas

Our year 9 class teacher, had already begun to plan some intercultural work with this class when they were in year 8. The school has regular 'curriculum focus days' where departments take responsibility for creating wider learning experiences for children within their subject area. She had planned a short unit of work around the Spanish film: La Lengua de las Mariposas, a coming of age story, based on the short stories of Manuel Rivas and set in 1930s Spain. She had watched scenes from the film with her pupils and planned a series of activities around this to help pupils reflect on some the key themes, but this had been done mostly in English.

Please note: The film has a 15 certificate. If you use this resource you will need to get parental permissions and to select the scenes carefully. The scenes set in the school were chosen by our teacher for this project.

KS3 Framework objectives

When we began to think about a focus for our project, the year 9 teacher wanted to build on the enjoyment and engagement that the pupils had shown when they had worked on themes from the film.

We were investigating the renewed key stage 3 framework for languages and were inspired by some of the intercultural understanding objectives for years 7 and 8:

• Year 7: Investigate an aspect of life and compare with their own, noting similarities and differences.
• Year 8: identify and explain an aspect of life that has changed over time.

These objectives gave us clear guidance about ways to develop the pupils’ learning using the film as a 'springboard'. We started to think about how we could structure a three-term project using objectives from the renewed framework as the key drivers for the planning.

It was important to the teacher that the project was a language learning project and that the learning should be conducted, as far as possible, in the target language. We wanted to see which objectives for speaking and listening, and for reading and writing we would need to invest in, in order to secure the outcomes in the target language.

International links

Serendipitously, before the inception of this project, the year 9 teacher had been selected to take part in a British Council Teacher's International Development Project study visit to Spain. This was focusing on teaching pedagogies in secciones bilingües, schools funded by the British Council where CLIL is a driving pedagogy in the curriculum.

While we were in Spain, the teacher made two strong contacts with two very different types of schools. The first was a large secondary school in Trujillo that had a similar intake in terms of age and social background to the UK school. 

The second was a primary school in a valley in the Val de Jerte region of Extremadura, which was part of a Collegios Rurales Agrupados (CRA) where most of the pupils’ parents’ main income was from cherry farming. The CRA is an unusual system used when the geography of the area prevents pupils travelling to one central area. Instead, a group of four or five small schools combine to create one school, with one headteacher and where the teachers travel from one school to the other to deliver their specialisms.

Both schools had secciones bilingues so there was a strong focus on English and the development of pedagogies to support the engaging teaching of the subject.

Once back in the UK, our teacher began to think of ways that she could use the two contacts to interesting effect with pupils. As a stimulus for exploring the year 7 objective of investigating an aspect of life and comparing it with their own noting similarities and differences, she thought that the two different types of school could offer rich insights into this strand. The Trujillo school would be likely to offer pupils insights into areas of similarity and the CRA was so different that it she thought it would be of interest to pupils to see the differences between the education systems in the Extremadura region.

Another thing that we had seen during our trip was a small display in a primary school of pupils’ written work that showed pictures of their grandmothers and some information about them. This inspired an idea that became a focus for the project.

You can read more about the key issues to consider, project outcomes, impact and future plans by following the links below. Alternatively, this information can be downloaded as a single pdf document from link at the bottom of this page.

Read more: context

Download report as PDF:
Talking to the Past and Popular Music, Solihull cross-phase project final report (.pdf)