English Martyrs R C School and Classic Motos Ltd
English Martyrs R C School, an 11-18 mixed comprehensive in Leicester, have been working with Classic Motos Ltd, a Leicester-based supplier of parts and products for British motorcycles, as part of the Business Language Champions programme.
Partnership activities
Lorraine Harris from Classic Motos visited the school in early 2008 to deliver language based presentations to four Year 9 classes and one Year 10 class.
Lorraine spoke about the importance of languages in the small business environment and how French language skills are used at Classic Motos.
The morning was a big success, as Lorraine said:
"It was an enjoyable and rewarding experience. I received a very warm welcome from the teachers, and the the students were enthusiastic. I hope it gave them something to think about, to challenge their misconceptions of languages being 'boring and difficult'."
Lorraine followed up the visits by doing some role playing sessions with the students on her return to the school in March 2008.
The sessions begin with brainstorming, where students build up a 'mind map' of useful phrases for buying things over the phone. They are then given a photograph of a motorbike, a shopping list of parts they require and a copy of Classic Motos French mail order catalogue and order form.
Students look for the parts they need in the catalogue, fill out the order form in French and use their 'mind map' of useful phrases to create role -playing dialogue where one student is the sales person and another the client.
This task worked really well with the students and Lorraine commended them for their efforts:
"The students really get into the role playing and I think they are surprised to see that with a limited vocabulary they are able to give information and make purchases over the phone."
Follow-up activities
The school followed up by talking about the general importance of languages in business and asking students to imagine scenarios where they might need to use their French in a business context. The Languages Work website was also heavily used to point out career and university options with languages.
The uptake of languages has been impressive, with 108 pupils taking a language at KS4 in 2008-09 and new opportunities to study languages are also being introduced, as Head of French, Matthew Purslow, said:
"We have plans to incorporate more business studies into our language curriculum, we have 21 students completing their Applied French GCSE this summer in 'Leisure and Tourism' French; we hope to extend this course and offer the 'Business' GCSE French endorsed by EdExcel. We have also recently introduced Spanish and German into our Year 7 curriculum and are hoping to expand this to the rest of KS3 in the near future; Spanish being recognised as an influential business language in the European community."
Sharing best practice
For further information and ideas you can download the background posters (pdf 1.1MB) and worksheet ( pdf 169KB) used in this partnership.
Language Challenge
Year 8 students from English Martyrs also took part in the Regional Language Challenge. This competition, organised by the Education Business Partnerships across the region together with the RLN and Comenius EM, challenged students to create an information pack for the visiting French Olympic Team in 2012.
Matthew Purslow was delighted with the school's entry:
"Our Year 8's were commended on their use of target language and attention to detail."
Download English Martyrs competition entry (pdf 5.69 MB) 
Further information
Find out more about English Martyrs RC School
Find out more about Classic Motos Ltd
 back to Business Language Champions
|