MTOT

The Mother Tongue Other Tongue (MTOT) multilingual poetry competition celebrates linguistic and cultural diversity through creative writing, and showcases the many languages spoken and learned by young people in school and at home.

Run very successfully via Routes into Languages in England, SCILT initially brought the competition to Scotland as a pilot in Glasgow in 2014. The competition has since been run throughout Scotland, allowing all pupils from P1-S6 to participate as well as bilinguals and those studying languages beyond school. 

Due to staffing and budget constraints, however, there are currently no plans to run the competition during the 2019-20 academic session.

You can still find out more about Mother Tongue Other Tongue below and use the resources to run your own competition within your school or cluster.

Resources

MTOT blog

The 'Creative Bag of Tricks' series on the MTOT blog provides a number of suggested poetry activities for the classroom. This is now an archived resource, but teachers may still find the materials useful.

Poetry resources

We have produced a number of resources and collated links to various websites to help teachers prepare their pupils for the competition.

These cover a selection of poetry styles and techniques as well as examples of foreign language poems and themed poetry.

There is also a link to National Poetry Day resources to help schools incorporate this event into their competition preparation.