A primary five class from St John’s Primary in Ayr recently took on something of a challenge: the children and their teacher set out to learn a new language in just four weeks. Using Radio Lingua podcasts, the children learned a few phrases each day, then put their new language skills to the test by creating stop-frame animations in Mandarin Chinese.

Radio Lingua Schools Director Mark Pentleton visited the class at the beginning of the project and started the project off with the first lesson of the Radio Lingua One Minute Mandarin course. Using the interactive whiteboard to display the enhanced podcasts, the children began their first steps in Mandarin, learning to say nǐ hǎo 你好 (hello) and they were able to say zài jiàn 再见 (goodbye) to Mark before he left them to work through the ten lessons of the course over the next four weeks.

The language covered in One Minute Mandarin (and indeed in all the One Minute Languages courses) includes basic greetings, saying that you speak a little of the language, counting, introducing yourself and asking other people their names, asking “how are you?” and providing suitable answers. Since each lesson lasts just a couple of minutes, the pupils and their teacher were able to spend just five minutes a day on learning Mandarin. Since the materials were also available online, some of the pupils were able to download the audio lessons at home and practise the words and phrases in their own time.

By week four, the pupils were ready to start planning the next stage of the project. The pupils were organised into small groups and, based on the words and phrases they’d learned within the course, each group was challenged to invent a story and write a script entirely in Mandarin. The children came up with some excellent ideas including using the numbers they had learned to start off a game of hide and seek, or to count down to the New Year. Each group also had to choose a different environment in which to set their story, from under the sea to lunar landscapes. The children rehearsed their scripts with the class teacher in role plays, practising the pronunciation of the words and phrases they had learned. Having completed their scripts, the groups then set about making their plasticine models which would ultimately come to life in the animation.

The next stage of the project was a two-day workshop with Mark. The pupils learned to use I Can Animate software and created their stop-motion movie frame by frame. Each group completed the animation element and then imported the footage into iMovie where they added titles and transitions. They then exported the video to Garageband where they recorded the voiceovers – in Mandarin.

No movie-making project is complete without the world première event, so the pupils invited their parents into school and during the final afternoon they presented their work to the rest of the school and to their parents.

As an interdisciplinary project, this project allowed the children involved to experience many areas of the curriculum:

• language skills – learning a language through innovative methods despite no in-school capacity for the teaching of Mandarin Chinese;
• literacy – developing scripts based on the newly acquired language and inventing imaginative ways to include that language within their story;
• art – creating backgrounds and plasticine characters to use in their animations;
• drama – practising their scripts and pronunciation through role plays;
• numeracy – learning about frames and timecodes for planning their animations;
• ICT – acquiring new technology skills in animation, video production and sound recording.

In addition the pupils involved worked collaboratively on the project, building their confidence and interpersonal skills, and shared their learning with the school and wider community through the final presentation.

The pupils’ work can be seen in our media gallery:

• In the Jungle – yī èr sān sì wǔ (一二三四五)
• Volcano Land – wǒ huì shuō pǔ tōng huà (我会说普通话)
• Under the Sea – hěn gāo xìng jiàn dào nǐ (很高兴见到你)
• Desert Island – shēng rì kuài lè (生日快乐)
• Ghoul House – hěn gāo xìng jiàn dào nǐ (很高兴见到你)
• On the Moon – xīn nián kuài lè (新年快乐)

If you would like to find out more about running a Radio Lingua Schools workshop in your school, please visit our Workshops area.

The One Minute Languages courses are currently available in Catalan, Danish, French, Gaelic, German, Greek, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Luxembourgish, Mandarin, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Turkish.

Radio Lingua Schools regularly supports foreign visits involving young people from Scottish schools. We are uniquely placed to provide technical expertise, enhancing visits with social media and interactive elements, and to design engaging activities for the learners involved.

Most recently 32 young people selected from across the country by Rotary International travelled to Strasbourg. There they met young people from 26 EU member states and took part in a debate in the hémicycle of the European Parliament. Working in conjunction with EP Projects, we designed the programme for the visit to maximise the learning experiences of the young people on the trip, and to provide an interactive blog used throughout the vist by friends, parents, classmates and teachers back home. This blog featured news updates in French and English and audio and video podcasts of the activities carried out in Strasbourg.

All students involved in the visit were in their final year of secondary school and were studying French at Advanced Higher level. Throughout the visit they were encouraged to use their French at every opportunity, and the programme of activities was carefully planned to allow the students to build their confidence in the language, working towards the Euroscola day.

One particularly popular activity was the Street Survey during which the students stopped passers-by in the streets of Strasbourg and asked them questions about various issues. In addition to being an excellent opportunity for the students to communicate with native speakers in a way they had never done before, this activity also helped the students to develop a deeper understanding of the opinions of people from other countries.

Part of Radio Lingua’s role in this particular visit was to prepare a video introduction to the survey for use in future visits. The students themselves planned the video and presented their advice to future participants in the streets where they had been carrying out the survey a few hours previously. This video can be seen below:

The highlight of the visit was the Euroscola day in the Parliament during which the students worked with their counterparts from the other countries involved and took part in a number of debates and discussions. Each delegation had to be presented to the Parliament, and our Scottish students did so with a suitable bagpipe accompaniment! The live blog ensured that this video was being shown in the schools of the participating students a few minutes after it had been filmed in Strasbourg.

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