Students at Woodbridge High School, a specialist language college in Essex, speak over 50 languages between them. The TAFAL competition was originally created in 2001 to allow students to demonstrate and celebrate their linguistic and cultural diversity. The Nuffield Languages Programme gave an award for the project to be extended in 2002, and the competition has just been run for a third year.
To prepare for the competition, pupils work in pairs over a few months to teach each other their home language, supported by teaching staff. A dialogue is then performed before external judges on the day of the competition, and prizes awarded. The competition has attracted much interest, both from the press (
TES, October 2002), and from other schools. Woodbridge has designed an information pack that it sends to enquirers and presentations have been arranged in local schools.
In addition to the growing popularity of the TAFAL competition locally and nationally, Woodbridge has found that the competition has had a positive effect on their students, broadening their attitudes to language learning generally, and to community languages in particular. The school is now hoping to involve parents in a similar exercise at a PTA evening.
