Thanks to Professor Anna Lise Gordon for writing this report for LCoL.
St Mary’s University in Twickenham, London, hosted its annual Modern Language Poetry Live event on Wednesday evening, 17th June 2026. Now in its sixth year, the event captures the aims and spirit of London: City of Languages, with its focus on celebrating London’s extraordinary linguistic diversity, inspiring people of all ages to learn and enjoy languages, and to engage with families, schools and communities in supporting language education.
For the 2026 edition of Modern Language Poetry Live, we welcomed 55 Year 8 students (aged 12-13) from 17 different schools in the London area. The Modern Language Poetry Live event is for non-native speakers of a language but, when asked how many of the finalists had knowledge of another language (not English, French, Spanish or German), a huge forest of hands shot up! This underlines the linguistic diversity that makes London so special!
Poetry Live is a competition with a focus on spoken poetry performance in French, German and Spanish. There are three main aims of the competition:
- To celebrate language learning for pleasure and challenge
- To develop memorisation and pronunciation skills
- To explore literature and culture through poetry in another language.
Participating schools receive a poetry anthology and supporting guidance and have complete autonomy on how to prepare and select their students for the grand final of the competition at St Mary’s University. In some instances, this may be a small club-based activity or a larger event with a mini final at school. As one teacher commented: “Poetry Live is a fabulous addition to our school’s Scheme of work and really brings pronunciation and language to life.”
At the Poetry Live final event, students quickly overcome nerves of meeting students from so many different schools, and are cheered on by other finalists, their teachers, and their supporters, families and friends. As one parent shared: “I never dreamed that my son would be brave enough to perform in front of all these people – amazing!”
In part 1 of the competition, students perform from memory their prepared poem in French, German or Spanish in front of the whole audience – quite an achievement! In part 2 of the competition, while the audience participate in a languages quiz, the students head off to different rooms to prepare a short, unseen poem for recital to the judges. The judging criteria throughout are:
- Pronunciation and intonation
- Flow / fluency
- Clarity
- Accuracy
- Expressiveness / star quality
The standard of performance this year was very high, including the occasional use of props and singing, and plenty of bold facial expressions and actions! The standard at Modern Language Poetry Live 2026 was higher than ever – a reason to be cheerful about the future of language learning in our schools!
Huge congratulations to all our finalists, including our Poetry Live 2026 Gold prize winners:
French – Sofya (Lady Eleanor Holles School)
German – June (Coombe Girls’ School)
Spanish – Yusuf (Coombe Boys’ School)
The smooth running of the event is only possible with a strong team of volunteers, including wonderful colleagues and trainee teachers from the School of Education at St Mary’s University. The judges are expert modern language educators, including members of the national Association for Language Learning (ALL), and work harder than anyone throughout the event. A special shout-out goes to Steven Fawkes, Co-President of ALL, who has been a judge at all six Poetry Live events – chapeau!
The wider benefits of an event like Modern Language Poetry Live are recognised by Professor Anthony McClaran, Vice-Chancellor of St Mary’s University:
“As someone who has worked in higher education, both here in the UK and overseas, I am acutely aware of the need for language skills and cultural awareness among young people, and I am delighted that so many talented finalists are participating in the Modern Language Poetry Live 2026 competition. The commitment of all those taking part in Poetry Live bodes well for the future in our ever more connected, diverse and inter-dependent world.”
We strive for the Poetry Live event to last under two hours – it is a school night after all! This means that there is a limit on the number of schools which can participate, but we are very happy to share resources and more detailed planning considerations with others who may wish to run their own version of our Modern Language Poetry Live event.
For more details, please contact Professor Anna Lise Gordon: