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Words by Amillah Javed.
Drum roll please! The moment finally arrived to award prizes to the students who won the Mother Tongue Other Tongue (MTOT) Competition, 2013.
 Mother Tongue Other Tongue launched last year to celebrate the range of languages found in schools across the UK today, and this year it became known, nationwide, as a Laureate Education Project. Led by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, the competition was split into two categories: Mother Tongue – where the entrant’s first language is not English, and Other Tongue – in which the entrants had studied and written in a language other than their native English. Thus, it challenged a number of students to write poetry in a creative way.
The Poet Laureate came to present MTOT certificates and prizes to a number of students here at Manchester Metropolitan University. The winners were chosen from over 1000 entries entered this year from schools all over the North West. Dean of MMU’s Humanities, Languages and Social Science (HLSS) Faculty, and Director of Routes Into Languages North West, Dr Sharon Handley, introduced the event;
“We are passionate about creating opportunities for pupils around the North West. As Director of Routes into Languages North West I am also passionate about promoting languages and encouraging pupils to learn languages. But what is very special about the Mother Tongue Other Tongue competition is that we are valuing all languages. Not only the Other Tongue–the languages which pupils are learning at school, but also the Mother Tongue–the heritage–the languages some of you speak at home. Those languages which are now part of the Manchester heritage as a vibrant, multicultural, multilingual community”.
“This is part of the Laureate Education Project and I would like to thank Carol Ann Duffy for engaging, embracing, and for leading this project with her creative leadership and making it something very, very special”.
 Claudia Conerney, the Schools’ Liaison at MMU, swiftly introduced the Poet Laureate, who took to the stage reading some of her poetry pieces, while her faithful stage companion, the musician John Sampson, performed and entertained the audience. There was also an outgoing pair of musicians, Lis Murphy and Emmanuela Yogolelo, from the organisation Musicians Without Borders, who delivered a workshop by singing in different languages and in different styles. Lis told us;
“We are going to be doing some singing, percussion, and teaching songs in different languages that we have learnt from kids and different people we have been working with around the world”.
 This allowed those who could sing–and those who couldn’t–to do so at the top of their voices, which was both fun and engaging for the all that were present.
One of the overall North West winners, Khaibar Sarwari from Xaverian College, performed his poem soon after he received his award. He told me that he was really happy about winning the competition, adding: “Everyone is so proud of me”. Marianne Daniels, who is part of the Learning Support in Xaverian College, said: “We are really proud of Khaibar at Xaverian and we hope this is the beginning of many”.
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