MFL visit to RAF Cosford
On Wednesday 28 June, two teams of talented Year 10 French and German linguists attended the British Language Champions “Flying High” event at RAF Cosford. After an hour journey by minibus, we were shown to the lecture theatre where the various RAF personnel and British Language Champions representatives introduced themselves and the day was underway.
The first activity comprised of a Russian taster, where the challenge was to be the quickest team to complete the simple translation activity. After this brief look into Russian, we were given a presentation about how languages are useful in the RAF, and that a particularly useful language was Arabic; two current RAF personnel gave us a quick insight and a pronunciation guide, before we constructed messages for each other to translate.
Once these presentations and tasters were finished, we were presented with a series of challenges which were completed throughout the day; including writing a prioritised remote island survival kit with justifications (in French/German of course!), participating in a code-breaking activity (where two members of the team were blindfolded, and the rest of the team were required to direct them to place items of clothing on a washing line - no English allowed!), completing a riddle activity to rescue the captured teachers!, and constructing a parachute which would successfully protect a chocolate egg after being dropped from a 10m platform (all of the materials needed to be ordered in French/German).
The most nerve-wracking activity for both of the teams was the requirement to give a 3-4 minute presentation to the organisers and RAF personnel in the target language about the parachute’s construction and then, following the presentation, answer some questions.
All of these challenges were appraised and collated into a final result which was revealed at the end of the day; the Arden French team were the runners up in second place - a fabulous achievement.
Both the French and German teams enjoyed this event and gained a fantastic insight in the application of languages in future careers, with a valuable opportunity to develop language skills outside of the classroom.
Jonathan Swales 10C
