Hearts and Minds 2025
This year’s EDoL writing competition shared its theme with the Europe-wide Day of Languages: ‘Languages open hearts and minds’. We asked language learners to focus on the words ‘hearts’ and ‘minds’. As ever we particularly enjoyed the many pieces with personality and evidence of thoughtfulness or humour.
We received entries in the largest ever range of languages, and thank our friends at Newcastle Languages Resource Centre for reading and commenting on those we didn’t have capacity to deal with!
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Arabic Chinese Farsi Ganda Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Italian |
Japanese Korean Maltese Norwegian Pashto Polish Portuguese Somali Swahili |
Tagalog Tamil Tigrinya Toki Pona Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Yoruba
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We also received a high number of interesting entries showing knowledge of more than one language.
The judges asked for a large number of commendations this year:
- To schools entering the competition for the first time
- To schools which sent entries in very diverse languages, celebrating their learners’ talents
- To all the schools which entered: judges felt they sensed the importance of offering this opportunity to their learners in spite of all the other pressures on them
- And to individual pupils commended for their creative thoughtful, personal, witty and well-presented thoughts on the theme.
An e-book is published online containing some example work from across the age range: Click here
24 prizes were awarded to learners across all age-groups.
Teacher feedback encourages the volunteers and judges to continue organising this annual competition :
It is so important to celebrate our languages and diversity, and this competition is a great springboard for discussion as I always include it in the EDoL resources I prepare every year for our tutor groups.
Many thanks to the judges and for the certificate.
We were absolutely thrilled to hear that our student entries were highlighted for their "especially rich multilingual contributions". This specific feedback is a huge encouragement for our students.
We will proudly display the certificate in a prominent location and ensure every student and staff member involved receives your message of congratulations. We deeply appreciate this recognition from ALL, and thank you for taking the time to share this wonderful news with us.