Pictured above: Linda Walker 

Nottingham Language Academy is supporting the first ever Nottingham European Arts and Theatre Festival.

The language school is sponsoring NEAT 2011 - a cultural celebration involving Nottingham's major arts venues, which runs from May 26th to June 12th.

The festival will celebrate and showcase the very best European theatre, music, performance, film and visual art for adults and children, and features artists from a range of different countries, including Norway, Denmark, Germany and Poland.

"Nottingham European Arts and Theatre Festival 2011 is a cultural celebration of the arts in many different forms, and Nottingham Language Academy is very pleased to support this inaugural festival," said Linda Walker, who runs the academy, based in The Ropewalk, Nottingham.

"As an organisation that is very much involved with Europe through our modern language courses and our English as a foreign language courses, it was very appropriate that we should back an event like this, and we are very much looking forward to it."

Giles Croft, artistic director of the festival, said: "It is always pleasing when a sponsor and a project are as perfectly matched as this. We are delighted that the NLA have joined us as partners in neat11."

Nottingham Language Academy offers tuition to individuals and businesses, and teaches English as a foreign language, as well as offering classes in the modern languages of French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Greek and Mandarin.

Classes are run during the day, evenings and at weekends, and are designed for people who want to improve their job prospects, travel and see the world, live and work abroad, gain a place at university or learn something new for the fun of it.

The modern foreign languages courses are linked to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, which now forms the basis of language teaching and learning in most European Union countries.