This project is an exceptional opportunity for the pupils and staff of two primary schools: a French rural, alpine school and an English inner city school, to develop cross-curricular skills and confidence in a foreign language using real life situations. It is also a unique and unprecedented opportunity to experience an environment completely opposite to their current knowledge of the world. Over the duration of the project, the pupils will use a variety of tools and activities over numerous exchanges (including IT) and each will experience a full week immersion in the partner primary school. This will enable them to establish long term relationships with foreign children, discover, first hand, the culture of a different country, different life styles and develop their life chance aspirations. The project has been designed to be a progressive evolution over two years. There are two main elements to the project : classroom exchanges and immersion visits. 1. Classrooms exchanges During the first year, the pupils will establish contact to get to know each other and share common projects ensuring regular exchanges using a range of tools including: paper and post, email, video-conferences and the eTwinning platform for sharing. The shared projects will include mathematic and scientific challenges, sending and receiving parcels with cultural artifacts, film and audio productions shared online and used in classes. The focus will be on learning English/French, both oral and written, to enable pupils to communicate more easily. For the second year the pupils will deepen their foreign language skills through shared cross-curricular projects (sciences, maths, sport) in preparation for the second immersion visit (English pupils in French school). For example: comparing flora and fauna of the different regions. After the immersion visits, the children will produce films of their visits to consolidate their experiences and demonstrate what they have learned. The diffusion of these films will enable us to highlight the benefits of the project to parents and the local community and to other schools on a departmental level via teacher training from the ‘Inspection Academique’ and via Headteachers meetings. They will also be shared on social media and the schools' websites. 2. The immersion Visits: During the first year, the French children will meet their English correspondents and discover the English education system in an inner city school. They will be immersed in English classes with 3 to 4 pupils per class for a full week. The following year, the English children will meet up with their French correspondents for the second time and discover life in a small alpine French school also for a full school week. Transnational workshops will be organised in the classroom over the two visits to enable the children to engage in dialogue and communicate between themselves, thus enriching their language competences. A number of cultural visits will also be organised during the visits to compliment the joint projects studied over the course of the project. For example, visiting a farm in France linked to the shared transnational project ‘from the farm to the fork’. When the English pupils visit France they will be hosted in the partner school as well being invited to other rural schools in the vicinity. This will enable the partnership to grow and make the project longer term incorporating future candidate schools for a linguistic immersion trip. Evaluation There will be an evaluation of pupils’ foreign language competence before, during and after the project in addition to using the results of academic evaluations. This project is a cooperative and innovative approach to learning foreign languages by providing young children with regular and real life situations to communicate and to be surrounded by foreign language, which we believe is the most effective method of inspiring motivation for and learning a foreign language. For the French children, this is a considerable advantage for the professional futures of the pupils who live in a region where the tourist and service sector is rapidly growing. For the English children who are from an area of high deprivation it is an exceptional opportunity to experience life outside their area with the aim of raising their aspirations and improve their life chances. To discover another culture and language will also help to overcome preconceptions, fear of difference and the unknown and awaken curiosity. This project will also give us the chance to study the best approaches to learning a modern foreign language.