Thursday 2nd March saw the second ‘WoLLoW’ conference: ‘The value of languages in our schools and in our communities’, held at the Ruddock Performing Arts Centre.
‘WoLLoW’, World of Languages and Languages of the World, is a languages programme, created by the former Chief Master, John Claughton, along with colleagues at Norwich School and Cheadle Hulme School. The programme provides a curriculum for primary and early secondary years, which encourages pupils to be curious about how languages work, how they are related and the relationship they have with other subjects and the wider world. In particular, it is a course which feeds off the rich linguistic diversity of pupils in our classrooms today.
The event, attended by 70 people from across the country, was opened by Mayor of the West Midlands, Andy Street (OE), and Jodh Dhesi, Chief Executive of the King Edward VI Foundation.
There was a powerful array of speakers from across the linguistic spectrum: Professor Ayres Bennett (Cambridge University) and Professor Charles Forsdick (Liverpool University) talked about the national context of language teaching, whilst Dr Robert Sharples (Bristol University) and Graham Smith (EAL Academy) explored the ways in which the linguistic history of pupils might move from being perceived as a negative into the positive of being multilingual.
Of course, languages are not just something that happen in school lessons but have an impact on communities and one panel, comprising Qaisra Shahzad; Founder, Curator and Executive Director of MACFEST (Muslim Arts and Culture Festival), Munira Alsuna, Head of the Manchester Arabic School, Leonie Gaiser, Lecturer in Intercultural Communication at the University of Manchester, Dr Emmanuelle Labeau, Director of the Aston Centre for Applied Linguistics and Dr Thomas Bak of the University of Edinburgh, encouraged everyone to study languages because of the long-term neurological benefits of such activity.
In the midst of all these academics, two former King Edward's School students, James Gooding and Mukhtar Mukhlis, talked about their own linguistic journey and their teaching of WoLLoW in local primary schools.
In his opening remarks, Andy Street said that languages were a ‘civic issue’, something that had an impact on our society, its values and its prosperity, and on the individuals in that society, especially in the most diverse community in this country.
At a time when language teaching is in decline and under pressure, the conference aimed to bring together expertise and experience from different places and different educational worlds to plot a way to show the world how much and in how many ways languages matter in our lives.
