Projects

Progress reports 2002 - 2003

Hayle Community School / College Watteau

Staff

Tony Wyld / Mme Marie-Hélène Ronsmans

Background

We were very pleased to be partnered with the school where our French Assistante’s father teaches English as this immediately gave the project an extra dimension and made it more real for us.

Having met the representative from our partner school in January, it was refreshing to see that we both had a similar vision. We were both very keen to get our pupils corresponding with each other and although my school would have liked to be able to correspond with e-mail, it was soon evident that packets of letters each month was probably more exciting for our pupils. Moreover, they have been able to correspond by e-mail privately if they so choose.

Progress to date

We piloted the link with classes in year 8, 9 and 10 corresponding with classes from the age of 14 and 15. We found that pupils in year 8 are keen but their language development is not sufficient to be able to correspond adequately with pupils from the Section Europeene. Therefore we have decided that next year we will limit the project to able pupils in year 9 and able and average pupils in year 10.
Pupils have written three times since January and all letters are sent off together so that no pupil can forget to write. In my lessons pupils write the French part of the letter and they can add English to it at home if they so wish. The first part of the letter is to talk about some topic area that I prescribe eg. house and home or what you will do over the weekend (to practise future tense), then pupils can add a section in French on any area and finally they can add an English section at home if they wish.

Letters written by my pupils are photocopied and then I mark the pupils’ use of French on the photocopy, return it and send off the original to France.

Future plans

We hope to build on this next year and ideally I would like to see more classes in year 9 and 10 participating. All colleagues in my school are enthusiastic about it and we hope that more French colleagues in our partner school will get involved. Otherwise we have an issue of equal opportunities as some of our pupils from other teaching sets are already saying why can’t they have a correspondent. If necessary, we may start another link with another French school but to dilute the effects of this project in such a way would be a shame. But because we have already seen lots of positive feedback from our pupils, we would like to get more of them involved if possible.

Our partner school wished to set up a mini-exchange and although at first we were not desperately keen to participate, we have come round to the idea and it is hoped that next autumn we may pilot such an exchange which would strengthen the link. Our pupils hope to go to Valencienne next October and invite their partners back in the spring term.

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