Abstract:

This project took place in UK in 2013 and was a demonstration of a facilitated, student-led, student-centred project led by University of Sunderland and Newcastle University’s open-access Language Resource Centre as part of the Routes into Languages North East Consortium. It is an excellent example of independent learning in languages through the Bring Your Own Device approach, encouraging the students to fuse processed information and information processing and become metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviourally active participants in their own learning process. It increased the engagement of students by enabling them to control their own recording of their activities and encouraged them to be creative in the selection, structure and control of their own learning environment, while reflecting on the process in a presentation.

Although there are many events around the country that aim to encourage children to learn a language, this is one of the first to so succinctly link food, media, popular culture and languages involving schools and universities. University students were actively involved in the Presentation Day and feedback from both the school students and university students indicated they were inspired to learn even more languages.

The participants were Year 9 students (age 13-14). To participate in the competition they had to film and narrate the process of food preparation of a typical dish from Spain, Germany, Italy, France, China or Japan in the target language. They carried out the filming at various locations and then gave a presentation in English at the University of Sunderland in May 2013 in which they reflected on the process.

The videos were submitted and moderated to allow multi-media viewing. They were then judged by a panel of language teaching professionals and senior academics.

All of the participating pupils’ food-making videos and presentations were housed on the Linguacast website (http://linguacast.ncl.ac.uk/v4/bo/pages/bo_content.htm?year=2013 an open source language learning project) in a special section for the Great Languages Bake Off, for use by participating pupils and teachers, University staff and students, and for free dissemination.

Keywords:

Languages, student centred, video, cooking.