Information for Teachers

Who is eligible to enter?

The competition is only open to:

To guarantee the fairness of the competition, students who have a reasonable fluency in French are not eligible to enter.

When and where will the competition take place?

Each school will have a Linguatrivia coordinator (a teaching or administrative member of staff) who will receive all communications from the organisers and will be in charge of administering the competition. The competition will be organised and held in school. Ideally, the test will be sat in exam conditions (one student per table) but, where not practical, teachers will be able to supervise the competition in their own classroom.

The competition will take place between Monday 18th and Friday 22nd March 2013 on a day and time chosen by the school.

How do students enter the competition?

Students must be entered by their teacher. Teachers can download an entry form from the website. The deadline for returning the entry form is Friday 15th February 2013. Unfortunately, we cannot accept late entries.

What's on the test? How can I prepare my students?

The test consists of 50 multiple-choice questions to be answered in 30 minutes. Questions cover vocabulary, grammatical and cultural aspects of the French language. A sample practice paper and an interactive quiz are available on this website. Using these materials will help students familiarise themselves with the format of questions and increase their chances of getting higher scores.

A number of questions are intentionally challenging. Teachers should emphasise to their students that they should not be discouraged by the difficulty of some questions. The aim is NOT to get every answer right.

Also, students are likely to be unfamiliar with some elements of vocabulary. Once again, they should not be put off; instead, they should be encouraged to develop coping strategies in order to infer meaning and make educated guesses (i.e. looking out for cognates, scanning for familiar words to deduct context...)

The answer paper must be filled in with an HB pencil only. Marks made by pen or any other kind of pencil may not be read by our optical scanner.

Is the competition available in other languages?

It is our intention to open the competition to other languages in the near future, but for this edition, we have decided to only offer it to students of French. The organisation of the competition such as this on a national scale is challenging, and we need to ensure that we can process the volume of entries efficiently and accurately. Therefore we are taking a step-by-step approach by starting with a single language at first.

Should students with special needs enter the competition?

Certainly! At the teacher’s discretion, where justified, some students may be granted up to 10 extra minutes to complete the test.

What are the fees?

There is a fee of £3 per student (or £2.50 when at least 50 students are entered). Schools subscribing to Linguascope pay £2.50 per student, discounted to £2 per student when 50 or more are entered. There is also an administration fee of £10. The entry fees cover administrative costs, mailing costs, stationery and publicity. The certificates and prizes are sponsored and paid for by Linguascope.

Schools sending payment with the entry form itself are eligible for a discount of £5, as this helps us to cut down on administration following up entry forms.

The fee can be paid by the student, the school or by both in part. The school is responsible for collecting the money and forwarding it to the Linguatrivia organisers. To help you in this task, we have prepared a proforma letter to parents. Click here to download the letter as a Word Document, or here to download it as a PDF.

What Prizes are awarded and how?

Every student entering the competition will receive a certificate and small prize.
The best scoring students will be rewarded with one of the top prizes. A maximum of one top prize will allocated per school to avoid a handful of good schools reaping off all the top prizes. In the event of a draw, additional points may be awarded at the organisers' discretion to (in that order):
- the paper with the most amount of correct answers;
- the paper with the least amount of unanswered questions;
- the paper with the neatest presentation.

How many students may enter Linguatrivia?

We recommend that teachers enter all of their students. The purpose goes far beyond "winning" or receiving national recognition. Not only does it provide a solid class activity, but it also helps stimulate interest in the learning of French and identifies and rewards achievement on the part of students.

How is the test scored?

There are 50 questions and each question is worth 2 points. An incorrect answer will cost students 1 point. If no answer is given, or if more than one answer is given for a question, no point will be awarded or taken away. The papers will be scored by an optical marking scanner to guarantee maximum accuracy.

How can I promote the event in school?

You can download a poster in PDF format to print from this link.

There is also a leaflet you can download at this link.

Important dates

Feature Button One
Feature Button Two
Feature Button Three
Feature Button Four