This project is supported by a grant from the Foyle Foundation. It uses the medium of radio to engage young people with the English language, and teaches young people to write both creative and factual pieces for broadcast. We applied for funding to run this project because we wanted to show how radio can be used to help the writing skills of young people in a non-classroom environment. The Foyle Foundation were an ideal funder for this project as they support a variety of English language projects, and we couldn’t have done it without them. The project works with students in the Folkestone Academy:

 

1. The students write fictional short stories for the radio, taking inspiration from radio monologues and audio books. They will be encouraged to draw inspiration from their own lives – in our experience, young people can produce powerful pieces based on their own experiences.  They will experiment with sound effects and music to illustrate their pieces. 

 

2. They will write factual pieces. We will introduce them to basic news journalism, and teach them the basic concepts of ‘news’. Then, they take information about current stories from the internet and write them into clear, informative pieces.

 

3. Finally, they write and record descriptive prose voice-pieces about well-known locations and landmarks in Folkestone. These pieces will create an ‘Audio Guide to Folkestone’, which will be illustrated with especially commissioned photographs and turned into a series of slideshow-videos hosted on the Academy FM website.

 

The project will end with an event where the works will be played to an invited audience, and broadcast live on the radio.