School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies

MEITS Outreach

Workshops on multilingualism with local pupils

We have been working closely with Nottingham City Council’s Team for Identity, Diversity and English as an Additional Language (IDEAL) and Nottingham Writers’ Studio to provide two series of workshops on multilingualism for local pupils who either have English as an Additional Language (EAL) or who are studying a Modern Foreign Language (MFL).

Workshops for Year 11 pupils

Workshops for Year 7 pupils

Year 9 pupils from Nottinghamshire interview University of Nottingham students about their language journeys.
 

 

Workshops for Year 11 pupils

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.

Workshops for Year 7 pupils

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.  

Martians-workshop

Students hold the ‘Guidebook for Martians’ 
 

 

Over the three years of the project, the students engaged in activities as varied as compiling a ‘  Guidebook to Nottingham for Martians’ (in case extra-terrestrial visitors lack the local lingo),   interviewing multilingual University of Nottingham Undergraduates about their language journeys, and sharing their own language autobiographies.

 

View poster for ‘Language Journeys’ workshop attended by multilingual Year 9 pupils in 2018

 

 

School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies

University Park
Nottingham, NG7 2RD

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