Heather Hunt, Liden Primary School, Swindon and Michelle Panting, Primary Languages Consultant for Swindon Borough Council.

The blogging project idea started in 2006 when I was involved in an area linking project between Swindon and Poitiers. Around the same time, I had been asked to take part in a conference in Swindon for teachers to disseminate good practice in their area of expertise. As I knew I would shortly be meeting my new French partner teacher at a contact seminar in Poitiers, I was keen for us to do something together so that the children could foster a ‘real’ relationship with their French and British counterparts.

 As soon as I was introduced to the idea of a Blog, I could see how this method of communication could be child led and offer a joint platform for discussing every possible subject in both languages. Unlike email, a blog is password controlled and very secure. It lends itself naturally to collaborative work, as messages can be sent and viewed as a thread. This means that conversations are easy to follow and to respond to.

I found I was in for a number of surprises! The messages gave me my first big surprise. After a few weeks, with my help, the children in my Year 3 and 4 classes were able to access sections of French text over twenty lines long with ease, confidence and massive enthusiasm. Rather than being daunted by this task, they were keen to read and respond to the message as quickly as possible and saw it as a challenge which they easily overcame with the use of collaborative language learning strategies.

What’s more, the Blog is personalised and offers the ability to upload photographs, videos and sound files, these are perfect for ‘seeing how the other children live’. Through these media, the children gained a deeper Intercultural Understanding. This led to my second and even bigger surprise!

I had expected that the children would learn about France, its geography and culture and this was certainly the case. What I hadn’t bargained for however was the empathy the children in my class were able to show towards the French children. Anayah for example was amazed to hear how far it had been for the Poitiers children to travel back from the Alps. She said, “They travelled all day and all night! It must have been very tiring.”

This element of empathy and understanding was so positive to see and the surprises didn’t stop there. I found that the Blog was changing perceptions and preconceptions and dispelling stereotypes of what French children were like. For example, Elliott was quick to dismiss one child’s claim that, “all French people eat frogs legs”. He said, “well, people say they do, but they don’t really. Not all the time.”

Zoé from Poitiers speaks of how her ideas of English culture are also being developed. “J’adore écrire les messages pour les correspondants et en plus on apprend plein de traditions anglaises.”  Her teacher Aline agrees that we have fulfilled our objective of making the language and contact ‘real’. She says, “C’est un moyen simple et facile rendre l’apprentissage de l’anglais concret et vivant.”

Ready to embark on our third year of ‘blogging’, I am hugely encouraged by the children’s progress in every aspect of language learning and would highly recommend this method of correspondence to any teacher as an enriching and fulfilling experience which they and their pupils can share with ‘new found friends’ in other countries.