A Level Students Blend Languages with Journalism

On Thursday 6th March, a group of Spanish and German A Level students travelled to Kingston Grammar School to take part in a Business Language Challenge called 'Scoop', where they had to use their language skills for real-life purposes: launching their own newspaper and creating an impressive front page.

They worked in mixed groups with students from other schools and had to very swiftly establish working relationships which would have impressed Lord Sugar himself! The pace of the work was frantic, as news stories were frequently being released and had to be quickly written up and edited. Business negotiating skills were rapidly developed, as they sold advertising space and managed to cleverly persuade a reluctant Porcelanosa sales rep to part with a large chunk of their advertising budget!

The highlight of the day was creating a promotional video for their newspaper that ranged from a professional to a tabloid newspaper in true TikTok fashion, not forgetting some cool dance moves along the way!

Students enjoyed “meeting new people and practising speaking skills”, “making the advert and filming it” as well as “combining business skills and being adaptive under pressure”.

The Business Language Champions conference at Kingston Grammar School was a great way to put our classroom learning into practice. With journalism as the key theme, we designed our own newspaper, writing articles based on prompted news situations. As part of the challenge, we worked and negotiated with marketing managers to sell advertising places. As a team we created the front cover, posters, and produced a promotional video, presenting our work at the end.

Miko, year 12

The great surprise came as we were returning back to school on the train: in true journalistic frantic fashion our students received the good news (via text message) that one of our teams had won the second prize for their German newspaper creation! Many congratulations to the team and well done to all our students who made us incredibly proud.

Mrs Carballo-Varela & Mrs Atchison
Head of Spanish & Head of German