Conversations with our language learners inside the classroom, or in the Language Lounge, allows us to get to know them beyond their identity as students, plus we love to get students involved in fun extracurricular projects. So, after hearing how many of them love reading, a discussion about the role of media in language learning turned into filming and editing BookTok-style videos.
Five students recommend their favourite books (and series) that are originally written in another language and provide insight into how that impacts them as someone who studies languages and, at the same time, cultures. We are proud to share those videos here with you and hope to inspire you to pick up one of those books or check out the series yourself!
Natalie, Rawdon and Liddie speak in English, Mollie in Spanish and French, and Sophie in German.
If you require an English transcript for the Spanish, French and German videos, please see: BookTok English transcript (Word doc, 15kb)
Natalie
History and German, final year - Series: The Empress/Die Kaiserin (Netflix) (German)
Mollie
French with Catalan, final year - Novel: La Lignée by Aurélie Valognes (French) // Lectura Fácil by Christina Morales (Spanish)
Rawdon
Spanish, French and German, second year - Novel: New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani (originally Italian, available in English)
Sophie
History and German, final year - talks about loving to read in general, an example for a book that can be seen on screen that you could take as an example is the novel Miss Merkel by David Safier (German)
Liddie
French and Hispanic Studies, final year - Novel: The Count of Monte Christo by Alexandre Dumas (originally in French, available in English)