ISSP Day: MFL Monday, 22nd January 2024
22 January 2024, eight of our most talented linguists in Year 9 were invited to Lady Eleanor Holles School in Hampton. During this day, our students were given the opportunity to develop their analytical and discursive skills through the medium of a film in either French or Spanish. Students were also invited to participate in a taster session of a language they had never learned before out of Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, or Russian. The students were excellent ambassadors for our school and we are very proud of how they embraced this experience.
Article by Teona N 9E
‘’Have you ever tried learning in another school for a day? Well, me and 7 of my peers all went to Lady Eleanor Holles on the 22nd of January after getting chosen to attend a special event for being top linguists in our classes. Our journey started by getting the coach at a couple minutes past 8 and we were all filled with excitement. We then arrived at this huge school where we got to choose a separate language to learn from the one, we originally came for (the options were Italian, Japanese, Russian or Mandarin).
This was then quickly followed by some French breakfast consisting of a warm croissant and luxurious hot chocolate in their canteen. This was then followed by a team building exercise where we were encouraged to communicate and interact with the other schools to fill out a language worksheet with French, Spanish and German on it. After, we were guided to our rooms in our groups mixed with various other schools where we watched a movie in our chosen languages.
I watched a French movie called ‘Belle et Sebastian’ which was a very moving film highlighting the connection between a boy and his dog. Afterwards, we were given exercises to complete on the film and completed separate tasks which we then shared with everyone in our group using new language which boosted our French vocabulary further. At that point lunch time had arrived and we went back to the canteen where we had spaghetti and meatballs with garlic bread on the side and were then allowed to go o onto the field where we explored the school further and socialised with other schools more.
In the afternoon, we did our taster session in the language we had chosen. I had chosen Italian, and we got taught the basics of the language in a fun and interactive way which we all enjoyed; after this our day had finished and it was time to depart from the school. Overall, this was an incredible day that enhanced our linguistic skills and opened our minds to how other schools work, I would personally go again and recommend it to anyone who gets this opportunity in the future’’
