French pen pals in KS3 and KS4 and French entries for the Lancaster University Languages competition:

The New Year is starting with news and best wishes from our French partner school: The Institution de la Croix Blanche in Northern France. All students who were in school early December in 7L, 7B, 8B, 9A and 9C and studying French were asked to write a Christmas card to introduce themselves to French counterparts and all have already received their New Year’s wishes as it is more customary to do so in January, on the other side of the Channel. Students are quite excited to discover more about their pen pals for the rest of the year. We hope this will engage our students to use what they learn in class in order to communicate purposefully with their peers across the Channel.  Our students write in French and the French students write in English.

The French Department would like to congratulate: Jawad Uddin 10K, Mark Ludden 10N, Ryan Varikat 10N, Mikael Kyriakos 10K, Arya Sharma 10K, Wessel Haartsen 9J who produced three very engaging 3minute videos, one of which is available to download and open/view via the following link:

“Why is it important to encourage young people to study modern languages?” One student spoke in Mandarin Chinese, the others used both French and English in order to be internally short-listed for the Lancaster University languages competition at KS4 level. Their linguistic ability is highly commendable together with their technical prowess in putting together their video clip on this important question.