On Thursday 25th January, Miss Saunders took a group of 13 Year 8 linguists to The Queen’s College in Oxford for an afternoon of modern language based activities.

The afternoon began with a very interesting talk entitled ‘What is language?’ in which the speaker used innovative and slightly off-piste methods to get his message across. Then, we were split into language groups – French, Spanish or German – and spent the first session learning an entirely new language – Italian, Portuguese or Hebrew respectively. We now know that the word for grapefruit in Hebrew is pronounced ‘esh-koh-leet’.

The second session was spent producing subtitles for a film in French, Spanish or German. Whilst choice of film was not approved by all the girls they had a good go at the task and developed their skills along the way.

The final part of the afternoon focused on how studying a language through GCSE, A-level and beyond can lead to some really interesting careers, and the girls took the opportunity to ask some thoughtful questions to the panel of MFL undergraduate students. There was talk of taking three languages for GCSE and becoming interpreters on the way back to Didcot!

Overall both the girls and Miss Saunders had an excellent afternoon and we hope the event will inspire our passionate linguists for the future!