Intent
We believe that learning a foreign language is a liberation from insularity and provides an opening to other cultures. Languages and cultural education will foster pupils’ curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world. It will enable children to:
- understand and respond to spoken and written language from a variety of authentic sources
- speak with increasing confidence, fluency and spontaneity, finding ways of communicating what they want to say, including through discussion and asking questions, and continually improving the accuracy of their pronunciation and intonation
- write at varying length, for different purposes and audiences, using the variety of grammatical structures that they have learnt
- discover and develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the language studied
Implementation
This subject is not taught in isolation, but as part of cross curricular topics and celebrating cultures weeks, with skills and knowledge of different subjects interwoven to enable children to make sense of their learning in context. As we have classes of mixed year groups, our whole school curriculum consists of a two year cycle. Our curriculum plan ensures that all National Curriculum objectives for this subject are taught with spaced repetition to enable consolidation and mastery by the end of each phase.
The progression document for this subject clearly shows the milestones to be reached by the end of each phase and enables teachers to plan learning sequences that are progressive. Assessments are made using the progression document and this is passed on to the children’s next teacher at the end of the first year of the curriculum to ensure that they are aware of what has been taught, achieved and mastered and the gaps in learning that still need to be addressed. This ensures that our curriculum is progressive and reactive, building upon children’s prior knowledge and learning experiences.
Objectives to be learned are not always taught in the form of a lesson and there is continual provision in the form of daily routines and providing retrieval practice for previously learned concepts. Knowledge and skills are also taught and mastered during Cultural Celebration weeks and enrichment activities throughout the year.
Our curriculum has been devised in the interest of our children to ensure quality of provision to enable them to acquire and develop a deep body of knowledge. We are mindful that knowledge does not sit as isolated information in children’s minds and so our curriculum is progressive, with knowledge connected in schemata. It is taught in the following way across the school:
Engage
Hook learners in with a memorable experience
Set the scene and provide the context for learning
Ask questions to find out children's interests
Spark children's curiosity using interesting starting points
Develop
Teach facts and information for deeper understanding and knowledge
Demonstrate new skills and allow time for consolidation
Provide creative opportunities for making and doing
Deliver reading, writing and talking across the curriculum
Innovate
Provide imaginative scenarios that encourage creative thinking
Enable children to apply previously learned skills
Encourage enterprise and independent thinking
Provide opportunities for collaborative working and problem solving
Express
Provide environments for reflective talk
Create opportunities for shared evaluation
Celebrate and share children's success
Identify next steps for learning
This subject is not taught in isolation, but as part of cross curricular topics and celebrating cultures weeks, with skills and knowledge of different subjects interwoven to enable children to make sense of their learning in context. As we have classes of mixed year groups, our whole school curriculum consists of a two year cycle. Our curriculum plan ensures that all National Curriculum objectives for this subject are taught with spaced repetition to enable consolidation and mastery by the end of each phase.
The progression document for this subject clearly shows the milestones to be reached by the end of each phase and enables teachers to plan learning sequences that are progressive. Assessments are made using the progression document and this is passed on to the children’s next teacher at the end of the first year of the curriculum to ensure that they are aware of what has been taught, achieved and mastered and the gaps in learning that still need to be addressed. This ensures that our curriculum is progressive and reactive, building upon children’s prior knowledge and learning experiences.
Objectives to be learned are not always taught in the form of a lesson and there is continual provision in the form of daily routines and providing retrieval practice for previously learned concepts. Knowledge and skills are also taught and mastered during Cultural Celebration weeks and enrichment activities throughout the year.
Our curriculum has been devised in the interest of our children to ensure quality of provision to enable them to acquire and develop a deep body of knowledge. We are mindful that knowledge does not sit as isolated information in children’s minds and so our curriculum is progressive, with knowledge connected in schemata. It is taught in the following way across the school:
Engage
Hook learners in with a memorable experience
Set the scene and provide the context for learning
Ask questions to find out children's interests
Spark children's curiosity using interesting starting points
Develop
Teach facts and information for deeper understanding and knowledge
Demonstrate new skills and allow time for consolidation
Provide creative opportunities for making and doing
Deliver reading, writing and talking across the curriculum
Innovate
Provide imaginative scenarios that encourage creative thinking
Enable children to apply previously learned skills
Encourage enterprise and independent thinking
Provide opportunities for collaborative working and problem solving
Express
Provide environments for reflective talk
Create opportunities for shared evaluation
Celebrate and share children's success
Identify next steps for learning
Children across the school will learn basic vocabulary in a range of languages that relate to their unit of study (ie children will have the opportunity to learn Spanish vocabulary during the Hola Mexico unit), thus enabling them to understand that different languages are spoken in the UK and around the world. This ensures that their experiences of languages is not focused upon French alone.
Teaching will be mainly of a modern foreign language and, in Upper Key Stage Two, will focus on enabling pupils to make substantial progress in one language, this being French. Teaching will provide an appropriate balance of spoken and written language and will lay the foundations for further foreign language teaching at Key Stage 3. The learning content in Upper Key Stage Two is based upon the curriculum plan provided by the local secondary school to which the vast majority of children transfer at the end of Key Stage Two, thus ensuring children are well prepared for the next stage of their languages education. It will enable pupils to understand and communicate ideas, facts and feelings in speech and writing, focused on familiar and routine matters, using their knowledge of phonology, grammatical structures and vocabulary.
The focus of study in modern languages will be on practical communication.
Pupils will be taught to:
- listen attentively to spoken language and show understanding by joining in and responding
- explore the patterns and sounds of language through songs and rhymes and link the spelling, sound and meaning of words
- engage in conversations; ask and answer questions; express opinions and respond to those of others; seek clarification and help
- speak in sentences, using familiar vocabulary, phrases and basic language structures
- develop accurate pronunciation and intonation so that others understand when they are reading aloud or using familiar words and phrases
- present ideas and information orally to a range of audiences
- read carefully and show understanding of words, phrases and simple writing
- appreciate stories, songs, poems and rhymes in the language
- broaden their vocabulary and develop their ability to understand new words that are introduced into familiar written material, including through using a dictionary
- write phrases from memory, and adapt these to create new sentences, to express ideas clearly
- describe people, places, things and actions orally and in writing
- understand basic grammar appropriate to the language being studied, including (where relevant): feminine, masculine and neuter forms and the conjugation of high-frequency verbs; key features and patterns of the language; how to apply these, for instance, to build sentences; and how these differ from or are similar to English.
Impact
Children will have an understanding of various cultures across the world and that different people speak different languages.
Children in Upper Key Stage Two will make progress ion French and:
- understand and respond to spoken and written language from a variety of authentic sources
- speak with increasing confidence, fluency and spontaneity, finding ways of communicating what they want to say, including through discussion and asking questions, and continually improving the accuracy of their pronunciation and intonation
- write at varying length, for different purposes and audiences, using the variety of grammatical structures that they have learnt
- discover and develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the language studied