Routes into languages Student Ambassadors Training

Once again, I was asked to speaking at the Routes into Languages Ambassador Training at UCL yesterday. Routes into Languages is a fantastic project that aims to raise languages awareness in schools and promote the continued study of languages at all levels.  Each year students of languages at a variety of universities around the country work as ambassadors, going into schools and running workshops for schools in their region.  This event is to give those ambassadors the training they need in order to be succesful.

The day is split into two sections, the first where all of the students are talked to about their role and where people who are involved in careers that use languages talk about their experiences and how they got into their relevant fields, then an afternoon of workshops to equip students to go out and really motivate pupils into wanting to continue with their languages study.

I took part in the first section of the day, by talking about how I became a teacher of languages and what was involved in training to become a teacher and what life is like as a teacher. I left the talk wanting to become an interpreter or translator as Gloria Vessey and John Evans filled my head full of their fascinating experiences of working with languages but I hope that some of the students left having a better idea of what life as a teacher is all about. It's always easy to promote teaching, as it's such a rewarding job with no day ever the same. I love it and, as I said to the students yesterday, I wouldn't want to do anything else really (despite what I wrote earlier!)

In the afternoon workshops, I ran a session on IT tools that the Student Ambassadors might like to use with pupils for whom they run workshops.  All materials can be found on the wiki that I created here. It was really interesting to find out which tools the students thought would be useful for them and also see their suggestions of how they could use them for themselves.  They all contributed to the Lino that is linked to here.

If you have the opportunity, I strongly recommend that you get involved with your local Routes into Languages Ambassadors.  I know I'm going to be speaking to my SLT about getting some to come into school to promote uptake of Languages as KS4 around options time, as although our uptake is fairly healthy, you can never have too many linguists...

ps... Also you may get lucky and get some fabby post it notes like the ones at the start of this post...

pps...I also got some tasty Christmas cake muffins and an iPad cover from the lovely Heather McGuinness, who I hope has recovered from her rodent-related incident!