About

Our Vision

Our vision is to create a learning community in which every individual has opportunities to appreciate cultural diversity, to manifest an interest and curiosity about different languages and intercultural communication.

Our Mision

The Linguistic Kangaroo contest offers opportunities for developing essential knowledge, skills and attitudes related to the linguistic competence. This competence requires knowledge of vocabulary and functional grammar of different languages and an awareness of the main types of verbal interaction and registers of languages, together with knowledge of societal conventions, and the cultural aspect and variability of languages. It also aims at developing respect for each person’s individual linguistic profile and appreciation for a country’s official language(s) as a common framework for interaction.

Our Story

In 2004, SIGMA Publishing House (Romania) launched the Linguistic Kangaroo Project. Currently, the contest is addressed to students in grades 3 to 12, passionate about studying foreign languages. Since 2005, the Linguistic Kangaroo contest has expanded internationally and today more and more countries intend to be involved in this project.

In 2007, SIGMA launched the Kangaroo Stories contest, addressed to students in grades 1 and 2, in mother tongue. Currently, students from the preparatory grade up to the 12th grade can participate in this contest. The contest aims at bringing young intellectuals closer to reading and testing their level and quality of text comprehension in their mother tongue.

Since 2010, the students in the preparatory grade and 1st to 4th grades were offered a new game-contest: the Explorer Kangaroo. The questions for this contest emphasize an interdisciplinary approach with a focus on sciences. More specific, the questions are inspired by: natural sciences, environmental studies, technology, civics, and geography.

Since 2014, the Institute for the Development of Educational Assessment (IDEA) is involved in organizing the Kangaroo Contests in partnership with SIGMA Publishing House.

Kangaroo Linguistic Contest was initiated and organized first time in Romania and was then taken to Italy; later it extended in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Pakistan. In some of these countries the contest has a different name.