On Thursday 27 November, Upper VI Modern Language students went to Reading School to participate in their annual language event for Sixth Formers. This year, the theme was journalism and we were welcomed by a talk given by sports journalist Simon Hart, who told us all about his career and language learning journey. It was very interesting to see how language learning propelled him in his career, and also to see the different pathways that people take after studying languages at A level.

After this, we were set our main challenge: creating our own newspaper front page. Throughout the day, we were sent “breaking news” articles and oral accounts in English, which we had to decipher through to work out which would be most appropriate for our chosen newspaper, and then finally summarise and translate these into our target languages. Additionally, we also had to go round the room and roleplay with the teachers, as they each represented different company brands with whom we had to bargain brand deals with. It was a very fun challenge, and definitely put our language skills to the test! It was also a very valuable experience to see how our language learning can be applied to the real world.

Personally, I really enjoyed collaborating with students from different schools, seeing different ideas and creativity blossom. In my group, our paper was called “La Génération Verte” and aimed to make people aware of the topical environmental issues going on around the world – both the good and the bad. One of my favourite parts was tackling the tricky translations from English to French. Although challenging, it was very enjoyable to manipulate the stories in a way which provoqued a certain tone, and gave them thrilling and captivating story titles. My team ended up winning the overall prize of the day, and I was incredibly proud and happy to see that all of our hard work paid off!

Chloe, Upper VI