MEITS Outreach
Year 9 pupils from Nottinghamshire interview University of Nottingham students about their language journeys.
The first series of workshops (summer 2017) was attended by sixteen Year 11 pupils, all recent arrivals to the UK who had not yet been placed in mainstream schools. The students worked together to compose and record poems about their experiences of moving to Nottingham, and also wrote greetings cards passing on advice to their ‘past selves’. In this way, they were encouraged to express the challenges of moving to a new country where a new language is spoken, and to reflect on the benefits that multilingualism can bring.
A second series of five workshops was held between June 2017 and May 2019, attended by a group of EAL and MFL students who were in Year 7 at the time of the first workshop. These sessions aimed to develop participants’ positive language identities, encouraging pride in their language skills, to highlight the importance and benefits of multilingualism, and to introduce pupils to the notions of prescriptivism and standard/non-standard language varieties.
Students hold the ‘Guidebook for Martians’