Song Contests
Spanglovision - a Spanish song competition for Year 7
‘Spanglovision is at the heart of our European Day of Languages celebrations and reaches every 
student and every teacher in the school.’
As part of ‘Spanglovision,’ each Year 7 group is given a Spanish song to learn as a tutor group in their Spanish lessons and tutor time. The song is then performed and videoed. The 11 tutor group entries are then shortlisted to 3 finalists. These 3 performances are shown to the rest of the school during European Day of Languages assemblies, and each year group votes for their favourite song. On the Friday of that week, the Year 7 Spanglovision winners are presented with the winners’ cup!
Our aim with this project is for learners to learn:
- how to have fun learning language
- how to use music and singing as a method for powerfully accelerating memory
- how to improve their pronunciation and realise the importance of good pronunciation
- how to improve their levels of concentration and focus in a group
- how to work together productively as a team
- how to perform
- how to use creativity to enhance performance
We use music, song, rhythm and movement for memorising key structures, such as pronouns, verb paradigms as well as key vocabulary and the project is certainly a useful way to introduce them to these learning routines and ways of working.
The focus on song & music as a way to improve the ability to memorise new language has also not been lost on our Y7 students and many say that they put their vocabulary lists to a tune now as a strategy for memorising new language. Typical answers to the question “what skills have you been working on?” Include ‘to pronounce words from looking at them’, ‘learning the different sounds’, ‘dictionary work’, and ‘memory strategies’. Three out of these four are the learning objectives from the Spanglovision project.
For more details, download the case study or listen to a description of how we run Spanglovision in our school from the 
SSAT conference in 2008. Download also the lyrics from our Spanglovision songs from all 4 years of the project; Year 1, Year 2, Year 3, Year 4. The music can be found on itunes.
Winner of the 2009 European Award for Languages
The Award recognises innovative approaches to language learning, and is coordinated in the UK by CILT, the National Centre for Languages. ‘Spanglovision’ also won the Spanish Embassy Language Prize, awarded for the best project involving Spanish.
We also ran a Primary version of the competition one year using Disney songs in Spanish. It was done on one full day and was part of our transition programme for Year 6 in that year. Here a list of the songs!
There are lots of schools who have their own successful foreign language song competitions now - I've heard of Linguavision, Francovision, to name just a few.