#ThinkLanguages 2024
#ThinkLanguages Week
#ThinkLanguages Week
Over 17,500 students across 200 schools celebrated the seventh year of #ThinkLanguages last week, hosting their very own festival of languages and cultures.
The event was celebrated across the week of 18 – 22 November and with the most participants ever, #Thinklanguages 2024 was a huge success for all who took part. Students, teachers, parents and friends got involved bringing languages and cultures to all parts of their schools with talks, quizzes, fashion shows and much more!
Schools kickstarted their events with an action packed opening ceremony, where speakers such as Dancing with the Stars pro Ervinas Merfeldas, TikToker Ciara Walsh, EU Parliament representative James Maher and Enterprise Ireland employee Rebecca Keogh provided an insight into their experience with languages and how they are important to them.
The students’ enthusiasm was evident throughout the week with schools posting lots of updates and capturing their day on social media using #ThinkLanguages. Our national ‘language inspired’ quiz, which took place twice a day each day of the week, was once again a big hit this year with over 1,600 teams from schools across the country vying for first place!
The Champion Team Competition was hotly contested this year, with schools being visited by judges to determine the three finalists who will attend a prizegiving in January. The prize up for grabs is a trip to Brussels, the languages capital of Europe! The prize is kindly funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs for a second year, as part of the A Career for EU Strategy. The standard of entries for the Champion Team Competition this year was exceptional. Finalists will be announced before Christmas. To find out more about the Champion Team Competition, click here.
Universities
We celebrated another year with our #ThinkLanguages partners as students engaged in a range of activities from The Irish Film Institute and Universities across the country. The activity within Universities proved to be a a great success with a diverse range of activities taking place on campus for TY students to engage in. X students participated in the activities, gaining an insight into what life on campus is like while many more gained insights into third-level life, with talks from student languages ambassadors who visited individual schools.
DCU kicked of the celebrations on Monday 18 November with taster classes as well as practical workshops for schools from across Dublin. They continued hosting workshops for 175 students across the entire week of #ThinkLanguages.
University of Limerick hosted a variety of language-awareness raising and language-learning workshops for 190 students, showcasing music and dance, a language and culture escape room, as well as a language and culture quiz.
University College Cork hosted over 180 students for the workshop “Fluent futures – unlock your language potential with #ThinkLanguages at UCC!, a Transition Year languages course”, featuring 8 languages Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish.
Maynooth University hosted 180 students across the week providing campus tours, an introduction to languages at university, as well as taster sessions in Chinese, French, German and Spanish.
South East Technological University put on a show for over 100 students with musical demonstrations from around the world. They then hosted interactive workshops in a number of languages for the students.
University of Galway provided a host of activities, quizzes and games for students while giving them an insight into the experience of being a student on campus.
UCD hosted approximately 300 students during the course of #ThinkLanguages Week and activity included meetings with final year language students to discover more about the opportunity to study abroad on Erasmus as well as a mixture of guest speakers giving the students a plethora of options!
TUD hosted language events for 60 students to give them the opportunity to practice French, Spanish and German and to try a new language like Chinese and Italian.
The Irish Film Institute
Another highlight for many proved to be The Irish Film Institute with cinemas nationwide showing foreign language films during #ThinkLanguages week, offering students the opportunity to see some of the best movies in the language they are learning. Films were also available to stream directly into classrooms for any schools who were unable to make to the cinema. In excess of X students watched foreign language films throughout #ThinkLanguages Week.
Movies that were streamed on #ThinkLanguages week included:
- The Fantastic Three/Les Trois Fantastiques – French
- The Teachers Lounge/Das Lehrerzimmer – German
- Love & Revolution/Te Estoy Amando Locamente – Spanish
- Neneh Superstar – French
- Greetings from Mars/Grüße vom Mars – German
- La Suprema – Spanish
