Preparing for your Home, Heritage and Community Language Exams

On Tuesday 5^th March, schools across Birmingham, Stoke and Staffordshire benefited from Trent and Tame’s latest CPD offer, this time focusing on preparing students for their Home, Heritage and Community Language Exams in the Summer 2024 series.

Delivered by NCLE’s HHCL strategic lead Clare Allison, HoDS and teachers alike were guided through the process of finding and paying speaking examiners, how to train speaking examiners for their crucial role as well as exploring the intricacies of the different HHCL specifications.  Hands on practical advice was shared by both Clare and HoDs across the region with everyone leaving with food for thought and practical strategies to take away.

Download useful resources here

Clare shared a range of resources during the session including a handful of speaking exam preparation booklets for students. Currently booklets are available to support students in Russian and in Polish. These documents have been shared in their original word versions, as they could be easily adapted to support students in other languages.

A sample script for speaking examiners (exemplified for Russian) was also shared. Again, this could be easily be adapted for other languages.

Clare has also created a narrated training ppt for speaking examiners which could be shared and completed by new examiners in advance of them conducting any exams. please e-mail ttlh@atlp.org.uk to request access to this training resource.

The second part of the session saw the creation of a currently informal HHCL speaking examiner network in Birmingham.  It’s hoped that as we move into the 24-25 academic year, the Trent and Tame Language Hub will be able to work with more schools across Birmingham, Stoke and Staffordshire to create a sustainable network of trained speaking examiners to helping HODS ensure their students can gain accreditation in their home languages.

Trent and Tame’s co-hub lead Tracy Williams said:

“HHCL is something that I didn’t know a lot about until I met Clare Allison a few years ago at Language World.  Since then, building a HOLA network in Birmingham has been one of the jobs on my to do list which has never quite got to the top of list!  I’m looking forward to making this a reality in the 24-25 academic year.”

For more information about the HOLA network in Sheffield led by the King Edward VII School, Sheffield please visit HoLA – Home Language Accreditation Project – 2022 – Association for Language Learning (all-languages.org.uk)