Ready for the Semaine des Langues?

What are you planning for la Semaine des langues? This year’s edition is from 18 to 23 March and is on the theme of « L’important, c’est de communiquer ! », which we would happily adopt as our motto here at Speakeasy News. The event makes special reference to the Olympic and Paralympic Games this summer in France: a multi-lingual, cross-cultural event like no other! Lots of schools have events planned. Here’s a selection of initiatives and ideas.

The Académie de Nice has organised a plurilingual competition, Histoires communes, to create videos linking sport and modern languages, on the theme of communication. If you participate in this, you might want to link it with our creative writing competition on a sports theme.

The Académie de Versailles has lots of suggestions about sports-themed activities, including a closing ceremony. They suggest discovering typical sports from English-speaking countries and they have some great videos of language assistants from Nigeria, Trinidad, the U.K. and the U.S.A. talking about netball, lacrosse, athletics and cycling. (Plus assistants speaking in other languages.)

The Académie de Grenoble has organised a video competition to present a made-up sport. We can’t wait to see the results!

Lycée de Villaroy in Guyancourt (78) has organised a week of films in English, Korean, Arabic, Spanish and German, one each evening at 5.30, open to students and staff.

The Académie of Orléans-Tours organises several competitions. For les Cicéronnades, pupils in 5e and above make a video of themselves reading a set poetry or prose text aloud. There are categories for 13 different modern or ancient languages. Reciting in this way is a great way for pupils to practise their pronunciation and word and sentence stress.

For English this year, for collège, the poetry text is “She Walks in Beauty" by Lord Byron and the prose text is Benedick’s soliloquy in Much Ado about Nothing by Shakespeare. For lycée, the poetry text is “Jazzonia" by Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes and the prose text part of a speech by President Lyndon B. Johnson, “Remarks at the signing of the Highway Beautification Act of 1965”.

The videos need to be sent in by 12 April. You can find out more on this flyer, and the texts are on the académie  site.

Les chaussettes de l'archiduchesse is a multi-lingual tonguetwister competition for collège and lycée. Classes potentially compete in five different rounds! And there's a creative writing competition, jeunes auteurs polyglottes.

"Any noise annoys an oyster but a noisy noise annoys an oyster more."