Prospectus
Multilingual Futures Conference 2009
Preparations for the Olympics have begun in West Berkshire!!!
Talented linguists from across West Berkshire participated in a Multilingual Futures event. The event was organised by the Education Business Partnership and The Downs School to show how important languages are in the workplace and also how much fun they can be!
Alex Pickering, representing the Goethe Institut and a former business man himself, talked about his experience of working in about 10 different countries – just because he was able to say at an initial meeting “Yes, I speak German!”
Student ambassadors from Reading University spoke about why they had chosen languages for further study – both of them admitted that the thought of working abroad for a year as part of their studies was a very strong incentive!
Other invited guests Alison Whitby, chair of governors at The Downs School and Sam Sampson from Newbury Corn Exchange both spoke about how languages have helped them not only in the workplace but also to make all sorts of social contacts and friends that they would not necessarily have made otherwise.
During the day students worked on an advertising campaign to promote various parts of the country, in time to allow us to benefit from the Olympics in 2012. They produced all their own material and then had to stand up and present their advert to the rest of the students and invited guests – in the target languages! Alison Millar, Director of Specialism at The Downs said:
To stand up and present to an audience of 60 other students and adults would be daunting for most people – to do so in a foreign language was absolutely amazing. The level of language was higher than we had ever heard before and shows that English people can speak other languages really well!
