French

Intent

At St. Philip’s Catholic Primary School it is our intent to provide all our children with a high-quality education in Modern Foreign Languages (MFL), which develops their love of learning about other languages and cultures. Our current MFL is French, however we strive to provide children with opportunities to experience a range of other languages. It is our intention to ensure that by the end of our children’s primary education, they have acquired an understanding of both spoken and written French, confidence to speak in French with others, and know how important other languages can be in their future.

The National Curriculum for languages aims to ensure that all pupils:

·         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

·         can 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

We teach French as our Modern Foreign Language in KS2. It is taught in a whole class setting and lessons are designed to motivate children and have clear, achievable objectives, incorporating creative activities to suit different learning styles. French lessons use a variety of sources to model the language, use games, stories and songs to maximise enjoyment and make as many connections to real life situations as possible. In Year 3 the focus is initially on speaking and listening, gradually developing skills in reading and writing in order to lay the foundations for foreign language teaching in KS3. Each lesson, children build on the skills they have already learnt and develop new ones through a range of exciting and engaging activities.

These include:

• learning French vocabulary
• asking and answering questions, and following instructions in French
• reinforcing memory with mime and physical actions
• playing games and learning songs
• video clips
• using bilingual dictionaries
• teaching of basic French grammar, sentence structure and spelling patterns
• learning French phonics
• researching and learning about life in France
• writing phrases and sentences
• reading bilingual stories
• creative tasks to demonstrate learning

Impact

Our MFL curriculum will ensure all pupils develop key language learning skills set out by the national curriculum, as well as a love of languages and learning about other cultures.

These are as follows:

·         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

·         can 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

We measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:

·         Pupil conversations

·         Staff voice

·         Learning walks

·         Book looks

The MFL subject team will continually monitor the impact MFL teaching is having on the children’s learning, through pupil conversations and book looks, to ensure children are making effective progress in their MFL learning.  They will also monitor children’s ability to retain the knowledge they have acquired in their lessons within their current year group and also from year to year. Impact will also be measured through teacher assessment during lessons and summative assessments at the end of each topic.