East of England

inspired sports projects combine language, culture, education, volunteering and business opportunities

Anglia Ruskin University Routes into Languages East Language and Sport and Active Languages events have been granted the London 2012 Inspire mark which recognises outstanding projects and events helping deliver the Olympic Games’ lasting legacy.
Part of the London 2012 brand family, it is the badge of the wider Inspire programme which has sport at its heart and London at its centre but the message behind the campaign is more than just about London and sport. It is for London and the UK, for sport and culture, for education, volunteering and business opportunities.
Routes into Languages East ran its first Language and Sport Day jointly with Anglia Ruskin University’s AimHigher Office, Youth Sport Trust and Health & Wellbeing Department which attracted over 80 year 8 pupils from seven schools in Essex. During the event, pupils tackled Capoeira (Brazilian acrobatic sport) in Portuguese, Wing Chun (martial arts) in Chinese, Handball in Spanish and Sitting Volleyball (a Paralympics sport) in German. The day gave pupils valuable insights into the importance of languages, the sports they tried and the language and cultures associated with them and life on a university campus.
A second project involved similar cross-curricular collaboration in an attempt to have a more long-term sustainable impact.
Active Languages Day was a joint event for teachers organised by Routes into Languages East and the Youth Sport Trust on the Anglia Ruskin University Chelmsford campus. Each school was invited to send a language teacher with a PE teacher to learn more about successful language and sports projects and how to integrate them into the school curriculum. The delegates had the opportunity to try out Capoeira in Portuguese and Tag Rugby in French. The ideas and skills that the teachers gained from the event will impact on over 1500 pupils per year.

Speaking about the benefits of the award, Sarah Schechter, Project Manager for Routes into Languages East at Anglia Ruskin University, said: ‘The Inspire Mark puts Routes into Languages East and Anglia Ruskin University on the map of Olympic Games sports and languages support organisations throughout the UK. Languages and culture are vital to ensuring the success of the Games as well as achieving the aspirations of the Olympic legacy.’

310 outstanding non-commercial projects and events have been recognised with the London 2012 Inspire Mark highlighting activities covering sport, culture, education, sustainability and volunteering.
 

Students from an Essex school got their first taste of learning languages with The Open University with an all-day introductory session in Chelmsford on Saturday 5th December 2009. Pupils from Thurstable School in Tiptree had face-to-face tutorials in Italian and were involved in a range of stimulating learning activities. They will now follow their courses online using The Open University’s pioneering delivery of the Elluminate audio-conferencing system which enables students to take part in live online tutorials. Further introductory sessions took place on Saturday 12th December 2009 for students of French and on Saturday 30th January 2010 for students of Spanish from the Plume School in Maldon. Using Cambridge University’s Language Project for Schools and Colleges (CULP4SC), students across the region will be learning through a mixture of real-time online tutorials and self-study, as well as occasional face-to-face study days at Anglia Ruskin University.
Pupils from Thurstable School in Tiptree will be studying basic Italian. Participants come from Year 8 to 12. Two groups of pupils from the Plume School in Maldon are taking part in the scheme: one group studying French in order to accelerate their progress towards an early GSCE; and the other studying Spanish in Years 10 and 11.
The OU has pioneered the use of online synchronous audio conferencing for language learning and teaching. The conferencing software Elluminate is used to connect learners and tutors directly from their home or place of work. This tuition method is The Open University’s contribution to the Routes into Languages East project.

Business Language Champions Plus (BLC+) is a project which aims to demonstrate to students in secondary and further education the value of language skills in the world of work. It achieves this by bringing together employers and schools to work on project activity and offer mutual support.

The project runs from 2007 to 2011, and is delivered by RLN East on behalf of CiLT, the National Centre for Languages and Norfolk County Council. The project is funded by Norfolk County Council and the Department of Children, Schools & Families (DCSF). The project aims to form 35 employer-school partnerships, the majority of which are based in Norfolk. For more information click here: http://www.rln-east.com/blc/

In 2009 Routes East hopes to join RLN/EESA in launching BLC projects in other parts of the Region too.
To read about the exciting projects that have already inspired pupils in Norfolk click here: http://www.instantflipbook.com/flipbooks/1374990242/
 

Please contact us at Routes East (routes@anglia.ac.uk) if you would like to get involved

In a very exciting development for CULP 4SC (the Junior CULP strand of the Routes East Consortium activity) two online programmes have been launched:

CULP4SC Online – Italian

The launch was on 5 Dec 2009. There are 19 students from Thurstable School, Tiptree, Essex. Online sessions began after the launch and take place on Mondays. Some students have chosen to use computers at school for the sessions, and the remaining use home computers. Some of the sessions have taken place with the tutor back in her native Milan..!

CULP4SC Online – French

The launch was on 12 Dec 2009. There are 24 students from Plume School, Maldon, Essex. Online sessions take place on Mondays and Tuesdays. All students will be using school computers.
 

On Thursday 17th December we were visited on the Anglia Ruskin Cambridge Campus by nearly 50 year 9 pupils from Thomas Clarkson Community College in March and their teachers for an ‘Options’ Day. As they were about to make their GCSE choices their teachers wanted them to visit a university campus and learn about the importance of languages for their futures. The day began with Language & Culture Taster Workshops in Portuguese, Russian and Hebrew. The teachers (and the pupils themselves) were very impressed to see how successfully former language knowledge could be applied in learning new and unfamiliar languages and how much could be learnt in a relatively short session. The pupils then had a taste of life on campus with lunch in the Street Restaurant, followed by a “Why Study Languages?” presentation. The day ended with a taste of yet another culture with a Caribbean Dance Session in stark contrast to their subsequent run to catch their coach through the heavy snow. In discussion during the day, the teachers lamented the fact that the pupils are not usually given the opportunity for visits such as these and noted how much difference they felt the day had made.

On 15th December Routes East ran its first Language & Sport Day jointly with the Anglia Ruskin University AimHigher Office, Youth Sport Trust and our Health & Wellbeing Department. A fun day was had by one and all on the Chelmsford campus as 80 Essex year 8 pupils from 7 local schools tackled Capoeira in Portuguese, Wing Chun (martial arts) in Chinese, Handball in Spanish and Sitting Volleyball (a Paralympic sport) in German. It began with a fun cartoon warm-up in Japanese to get everyone in the mood. On hand all day were two of our Student Language Ambassadors, Stina and Pilar to help with the sports and use every opportunity to convince the pupils of the importance of languages and the opportunities they offer. The day gave the pupils valuable insights into the importance of languages, the sports they tried and the language and cultures associated with them, as well as life on a university campus. This included lunch in the Sawyers restaurant, kindly donated by the Anglia Ruskin AimHigher/Widening Participation Office, who also ‘lent’ us AimHigher Development Officer Rhys Bearder, himself an ex-Student Language Ambassador from Routes North-East who ran the Spanish Handball with great professionalism (linguistically and sports-wise!). The day was deemed a huge success, not only by the participants themselves, but also the teachers, one of whom wrote straight after the event to thank us and report the impact that the day had had on her teaching with the ideas generated by what she had observed and the impact it had had on her pupils.

A good time was had by all at the Routes East China Day on the Anglia Ruskin University Chelmsford campus at the beginning of the month. The day was organised in partnership with the Essex Jiangsu Centre for Chinese Studies (the Essex Jiangsu Centre is a collaborative project between Essex County Council’s Schools, Children and Families Directorate and the Jiangsu Provincial Government’s department of education), AimHigher, Anglo-European School and SSAT Essex Confucius Classrooms. The day got off to a flying start with a Lion Dance performed by the UK South Region Wing Chun Association. The year 9 pupils from local AimHigher schools then enjoyed workshops in calligraphy, paper-folding, language and thinking skills and Wing Chun (Chinese Martial Arts). The pupils were helped by the Routes East PGCE Trainee Student Language Ambassadors. Lunch was specially prepared by the Anglia Ruskin University Catering Department and consisted of Chinese food with a pizza option for those not quite ready to fully embrace all aspects of the culture. One enterprising pupil was seen eating his pizza with chopsticks. The day gave the pupils valuable insights into Chinese language and culture as well as bringing them onto a university campus. The event was pronounced a huge success by all participants, one of whom remarked that it was the best school visit he’d ever been on.

Cambridge: World Centre of Language
The Routes into Languages Festival of Ideas event, Cambridge: World Centre of Language, in partnership with Cambridge University Press and Cambridge ESOL was held at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. It was an evening of connections and reminiscences. The idea for the evening came from the Routes Director, Dr Tony Morgan, who felt that the Festival of Ideas with this year’s theme of ‘Cambridge revealed: ideas that shaped the world; past, present and future’ offered the perfect opportunity to present the 'Cambridge Phenomenon' as a Linguistic as well as a Scientific dynamic which has had global effects. The idea further developed into an opportunity to make connections: between EFL and languages and their practitioners, past and present, linking ARU/CCAT with the EFL schools, to present a historic review/presentation of the role of Cambridge as a global centre for language/communication in the past half century
Melissa Good, Dictionaries Editor for Cambridge University Press delivered the first lecture in the Mumford Theatre. Melissa kicked off (!) with a video of Arsene Wenger telling how he came to Cambridge to learn English, and extolling the virtues of language learning (http://www.ukgermanconnection.org/cms/?location_id=705). Drawing on her research and the memories of Adrian du Plessis, she went on to consider the impact of the Cambridge EFL community in the 1950s/1960s/1970s, which produced the Cambridge Proficiency 'gold standard' of communicative language learning, the role of Frank Bell, Lennox Cook and the Studio School and the consequent impulse this gave to drawing into Cambridge a global community of students keen to learn English. This, in turn, injected a cosmopolitan and multilingual dimension to the small market town in the Fens and its growing bunch of EFL teachers, some of whom would go on to become Cambridge University researchers and promoters of Cambridge. Melissa went on to introduce the future with an outline of the English Profile project, a collaborative programme, creating a ‘profile’ or set of Reference Level Descriptions for English linked to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR).
There then followed a reception in the Ruskin Gallery, with an opportunity for networking and sharing reminiscences. Lee Knapp spoke on behalf of Cambridge ESOL and Annie Morgan James, Director of the Anglia Ruskin University Language Centre gave a welcome on behalf of the Faculty of Arts, Law & Social Sciences. She spoke about the importance of the Routes into Languages project and how exciting it was to have an evening celebrating the importance of both EFL and MFL. A presentation was then made to Tony Millns, the CEO of English UK, who has a long connection with Cambridge, to mark his 10 years in office.
The second lecturer was Barry Jones, Fellow in Modern Languages at Homerton College, who delighted the audience with his lively journey through the history of language teaching from 1658 with the publication of Comenius' Orbis Sensualium Pictus, showing how a wide range of methods and techniques for teaching modern languages have been proposed and put into practice for the last 250+ years. The presentation illustrated and explored a number of original materials, showing how pictures, sound, gesture, cartoons, film, humour and sometimes strange contexts have been used in an attempt to motivate modern language learners of all ages.
The evening was a huge success, with over 100 people enjoying the connections and reminiscences.
 

Wednesday 21st October saw 15 delightful year 8 pupils from Linton Village College descend on Routes East at Anglia Ruskin University. They were part of the Language Futures pilot project running at LVC. The pilot involves the pupils selecting the language they want to study with the school supporting them in their learning. There are 10 students studying Spanish, 4 studying Italian, and 1 each studying Mandarin Chinese, German and Portuguese (unfortunately 2 students were unwell and therefore unable to attend).
 

Wednesday's visit involved lunch in the University restaurant with Student Language Ambassadors, all native speakers of the languages being studied. It is hoped that these contacts will continue in the near future with a return visit to Linton where an e-mentoring programme will be launched. The pupils were then taken to a multimedia language laboratory where they were given a presentation on learning languages, introducing them to some recommended websites, including the excellent Why Study Language? (produced by LLAS) and Universed (produced by Routes into Languages North-East) sites (see powerpoint below). The Student Language Ambassadors provided support and guidance with all the activities.

The visit was much enjoyed by all and we look forward to working with Linton Village College on this exciting project.

(For photos see gallery)