Mother Tongue Other Tongue Celebration Event

Wow, they were fantastic!!!

On Tuesday 13th December a record number of students, together with their families and teachers descended on Routes into Languages East, in our new home at Cambridge University.

The Mother Tongue Other Tongue project (originally devised by staff at the Faculty of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Manchester Metropolitan University and Routes into Languages North West. Piloted in 2012, it has been adopted as a Laureate Education Project and shared with regions across the country) has grown and grown each year. This year of the hundreds of entries submitted to teachers, 64 school winners  (Year 7 - Year 12) from 13 schools were submitted to Routes into Languages East for the final judging. All the shortlisted poems were included in the printed Anthology, which each student was given as a prize (more copies are available here at £5 per copy - email ss2431@cam.ac.uk to request a copy).

The competition comprises 2 categories:

• Mother Tongue – pupils whose first language is not English, or who speak another language at home, are encouraged to submit a poem or song in their Mother Tongue. This can be an original or a ‘remembered’ piece.
  It can be written in any language, except English. Entries will be judged on a short paragraph in which pupils will explain the piece and its significance to them.

• Other Tongue – pupils learning another language in school are encouraged to get creative with their Other Tongue and submit an original poem for the competition. 

There was a huge wealth of wonderful poetry submitted this year and our panel of judges (consisting of language and poetry experts) often found it very difficult to select the winners. So difficult, in fact, that the original plan of a winner per key stage was abandoned and winners and highly commended prizes were awarded for each year group submitted:

1. MOTHER TONGUE

	Year 7
1.	Saadia Joomun	Creole	Shoeburyness High School	HC
2.	Vlad Puntusov	Russian	St Ivo School	Winner
	Year 8
3.	Rosanna Poll	Dutch	Comberton Village College	Winner
	Year 9
4.	Pauline Przywara	German	Parkside	HC
5.	Denis Dorohoi	Romanian	King Edward VI School	HC
6.	Zeena Hadi	Arabic	Longsands Academy	Winner
	Year 10
7.	Jiao Lin Chen	Chinese	Ely College	Winner
	Year 12
8.	Jingqing Yu	Chinese	Ely College	Winner

 

2. OTHER TONGUE

	Year 7
9.	Gabe Croft	German	St Ivo School	HC
10.	Izabela Romejko	Spanish	The Voyager Academy	HC
11.	Grace Futter	French	Norwich School	Winner
	Year 8
12.	Mia Heffelfinger	French	Parkside	HC
13.	Dan Spinks	Spanish	Newmarket Academy	HC
14.	Dusty Morrison	French	Parkside	HC
15.	Ethan Ward	German	St Ivo	Winner
	Year 9
16.	Fenella Henderson Chia	French	Gresham’s  School	HC
17.	Kai Laurence	German	St Ivo	HC
18.	Sophie Dubery	French	Longsands Academy	HC
19.	Tim Balitsky	French	Parkside	Winner
	Year 10
20.	Zoe Postlethwaite	German	St Ivo	Winner
	Year 12
21.	Claire Mordue	German	Parkside	HC
22.	Tom Scott	French	Gresham’s School	Winner

 

The 120 students, teachers and parents seemed to really enjoy visiting the the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at Cambridge University where the Celebration Event was held in the Little Hall lecture theatre. The programme included the awarding of prizes, with some poets performing their poems, as well as an amazing Poetry Slam, led by Slam Poetry UK Champion, Joelle Taylor (click on her name for a link to her website or here to see her performing her powerful poem, 'Last Poet Standing', one of the poems she performed at the Celebration Event), featuring young poets from a group of 14 Voyager Academy students from Peterborough, who had taken part in a workshop with Joelle on Language & Identity at the University in the afternoon. This was Joelle's second time headlining for Routes into Languages East and once again the students absolutely loved her!

The Celebration Event was great fun - well done to all the poets and their teachers!