French

Rational / Vision

Founded in hope St. Mary’s CE (VA) Primary School is a place where all can find their voice, grow in wisdom and live well in community and service.

The Modern Foreign Languages curriculum plays a fundamental role in realising our school vision of hope.

Finding our voice – Oracy is the foundation of Modern Foreign Languages. Modern Foreign Languages allows children to develop the skills and confidence to communicate effectively across languages for practical purposes; giving them opportunities to; grow in self-esteem, self-confidence and emotional wellbeing whilst instilling a love of spoken language.

Living in community and service – Through learning about the similarities and differences between French and English culture and language, the Modern Foreign Languages curriculum develops knowledge and understanding of other cultures which allows our community to grow in understanding, appreciation and curiosity of our ourselves and others locally, nationally and globally.

Growing in wisdom –Modern Foreign Language facilitates an understanding of other cultures and provides children with a firm foundation for language learning that encourages and enables them to apply their skills to learning further languages, developing a strong understanding of the English language, enabling further study and opening opportunities.

Intent

• Through our Languages Curriculum pupils become language detectives and are encouraged to find patterns in language. Learning is sequenced in a spiral curriculum, with key skills revisited repeatedly with increasing complexity, allowing pupils to revise and build on their previous learning. Cross-curricular links are included throughout our French units, allowing children to make connections and apply their language skills to other areas of their learning where appropriate. Our curriculum supports pupils to meet the National Curriculum end of Key Stage 2 attainment targets (there are no Key Stage 1 attainment targets for Languages). The Modern Foreign Languages curriculum is designed with five core concepts that run throughout. These are;
  • Speaking and pronunciation
  • Listening
  • Reading and Writing
  • Grammar
  • Intercultural understanding

Provision/Implementation

• Our Modern Foreign Languages French curriculum aims to instil a love of language learning; strong foundations for language learning and an awareness of other cultures.
• Pupils are given opportunities to communicate for practical purposes around familiar subjects and routines. Balanced opportunities are provided for communication in both spoken and written French, although in Year 3 the focus is on developing oral skills, before incorporating written French in Year 4, Year 5 and Year 6.
• Teaching and learning incorporates a range of teaching strategies and creative tasks ranging from independent tasks, paired and group work including role-play, language games, written tasks and language detective work in a multitude of cross-curricular contexts.
• Our curriculum focuses on developing what we term ‘language detective skills’ and developing an understanding of French grammar, rather than committing to memory vast amounts of French vocabulary.
• Language detective strategies for learning include; identifying cognates and near cognates; using sentence STEMs to build key vocabulary; shades of meaning which identify that not all vocabulary has a direct translation between French and English; dictionary skills to identify words to explore grammatical rules.
• Knowledge organisers are used alongside lessons to scaffold essential knowledge.
• Through simultaneously learning about the French and English language children develop a strong understanding of intercultural and grammatical links and develop the confidence to make links between other spoken languages in a creative and cross-curricular way.
• Oracy is the foundation of the Modern Foreign Languages curriculum and allows children to develop their understanding of language with building complexity and the confidence to apply this to real settings in the future.
• Evidence is built through collecting photographs and videos.Teachers use targeted questioning which enables the teacher to make informed judgments on pupil’s progress.
• Impact is continuously assessed through both formative and summative assessment. Use of quizzes will assist teachers with their assessments. Written evidence is scrutinised with and expectation that knowledge catchers are used as part of the end of unit assessments.
• Each lesson includes guidance through; planning, video and written explanations linking to the conceptual pillars; support in assessing pupils against the learning objectives.

Impact

In following the Modern Foreign Languages curriculum our expectation is that all pupils are French literate and are able to draw on a  range of language-learning skills to enable them to study French, or any other language with increasing confidence at Key Stage 3.

• Be able to engage in purposeful dialogue in practical situations.
• Make increasingly accurate attempts to read unfamiliar words, phrases, and short texts.
• Speak and read aloud with confidence and accuracy in pronunciation.
• Demonstrate understanding of spoken language by listening and responding appropriately.
• Use a bilingual dictionary to support their language learning.
• Be able to identify word classes in a sentence and apply grammatical rules they have learnt.
• Have a developed awareness of cognates and near-cognates and be able to use them to tackle unfamiliar words in French, English, and other languages.
• Be able to construct short texts on familiar topics.
• Meet the end of Key Stage 2 stage expectations outlined in the National Curriculum for Languages.