The following Coventry schools were involved in the Nuffield Project. Here is a summary of the work that they undertook:

1. Joseph Cash Primary ( lead teacher: Carole Court)

Joseph Cash school ran a day in which every single class from reception up untile year 6 pursued activites in different languages. The day was attended by local eccentrics Nina and Frederick and a video was made as a record of the event.

Activities included a cookery class in Danish, famous childrens stories in Norwegian and Swahili, “two little dickie birds” in Panjabi and learning how to sign ones name. Teachers and pupils were all very positive about the event and the multilingual dimesion was maintained in the class throughout the year. Here are the views of two pupils:

"I learnt how to speak some Danish. So now I can speak some Danish, English, Farsi and a bit of French ( I did the French at the Language Ambassadors day at Coventry City Football Club )" Mohammed

"I felt nervous when I was speaking Kurdish at first. But then I felt proud. My Uncle taught me French when I was a little boy. We came through France on our way from Albania." Dardan

"I learnt how it might feel to go to a different country and not know the languages and have to learn all the words. It made me want to start to learn languages." Ben

2. Mount Nod ( lead teacher: Alison Patchett)

The project at Mount Nod began with a launch week in which all key stage 2 classes did some very simple language activities at the end of each day. During this week we also surveyed the school to find out how many languages were
spoken. This led to us producing the "Language Wall", celebrating all languages in the school, which was regularly changed throughout the year.

Class 3/4 BP went on to become Language Investigators. Each child created their own persona to work through the investigations. It was decided to allow the children to work at their own pace through a series of activities, some worked
alone, others chose to work in pairs. Approximately half an hour each week was set aside for the work, and the children soon got into the swing of working through the activities. The activities themselves were packaged up as an
investigation, with all instructions and resources needed in a plastic wallet. This meant the children worked very independently and soon became quite competitive with others.

This series of lessons was followed up with some work focusing on Spanish alone, thanks to a visiting Spanish teacher we had in school for a few weeks. During this time, the children played games in Spanish, did weather forecasting in Spanish, learnt colours, numbers, animals and items of clothing in Spanish as well as cooking a Spanish meal.

At the end of the school year the children were asked, as usual, to write about the highlights of their year. Many included the language project in this.

3. All Saints C of E ( lead teacher: Maggie Croft)

We invited some PGCE students in from Warwick University to do language tasters in French and German and we ran a languages week which culminated in a whole-school Assembly. At that time we had an Algerian boy in our class. He could hardly speak any English but he was very proud to share his knowledge of Arabic and French.

The following term year six did some parallel text work. We started off with some multilingual tourist brochures which were acquired “en masse” from a hotel in Holland ! Pupils were asked to identify the languages and to start to look for similarities and differences. This linked in very well with some of the literacy work that we had undertaken.

We then purchased some Harry Potter books in French, German, Spanish, and Dutch along with the stories on cassette. We launched big investigation into the different languages and the pupils were delighted to use a familiar text as their starting point.

4. Frederick Bird ( lead teacher: Sarah Whalley)

Following a launch day with activities in seven different languages, we concentrated on linking the literacy framework to some of the multilingual activities. There was quite a bit of overlap and we started to introduce links to other languages into our literacy hour.

Alongside this we ran a French club and a group of twelve of students attended the Language Ambassadors Conference where they learnt some Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Swahili and French. There are a number of pupils in our school who want to be Language Ambassadors.

5. Manor Park ( lead teacher: Julie Neale)

As part of our training school activities, we worked with 3 trainees from Warwick University on the creation of a Modern Foreign Language Awareness Course, which was delivered to all the children in year 6 in the 5 weeks after the Key Stage 2 SATs.

The course gave the pupils access to 3 European Languages, French, Spanish and German, the aim was not to teach a particular language, but to develop in the pupils an interest in language learning and an introduction to language learning skills prior to the start of language learning in the secondary school.

We were all surprised and pleased by the overt enthusiasm shown by the pupils and perhaps more surprising, the way that the less able pupils took an active role in the lessons. It was clear that their lack of self-confidence in the “normal curriculum” did not hinder them in this “new for all” subject.

The trainees involved in the unit were also very enthusiastic about the way that it had enhanced their teaching practice at the school. The 2 year 3 trainees, who will be returning to us as year 4 trainees will be following up the pupils to try to assess the impact of the course on attitudes in year 7.

6. Holbrook Community ( lead teacher: Manjeet Chand)

Our first language day was based on performance and we invited in some teachers from President Kennedy School to work with us on some French and Spanish songs and activities. The children enjoyed this immensely and had great fun with the teachers from our partner Secondary School.

We then followed on with an investigation day. Pupils had to link questions to answers in the same language, to look at different genres of text in Portuguese, to undertake some parallel text work relating to Harry Potter and finally to transliterate some place names from the Russian and Greek alphabets. The activities were very challenging but I was surprised how much they were able to do. They really enjoyed being language investigators.