Our MFL PGCE trainee teachers are at the end of their placements so on Monday 10th June we invited them into iLab to experience two ENACT activities - making French pancakes and learning Chinese calligraphy. This gave them an insight into how language learners experience these activities, as although most of them had an excellent standard of French, Chinese characters and pronunciation were certainly new to them.
The group was led by one of our Chinese Postgraduate students in the Chinese Calligraphy activity, and they enjoyed learning new vocabulary and using a brush and ink to write the characters. They then watched the French crepes activity, created by Nathalie Paris, before heading to the kitchen to take turns cooking pancakes by following the video instructions. The visit was a huge success and got them thinking about how they can incorporate autheniticity and real world language learning opportunities into their future teaching of MFL. The highlight for them was watching their peers flip pancakes with mixed success!
