French

French

Learning a foreign language is a necessary part of being a member of a multi-cultural society and provides an opening to other cultures. A high-quality languages education should foster children's curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world. The teaching should enable children to express their ideas and thoughts in another language and to understand and respond to its speakers, both in speech and in writing. It should also provide opportunities for them to communicate for practical purposes, learn new ways of thinking and read great literature in the original language. Language teaching should provide the foundation for learning further languages, equipping children to study and work in other countries.

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

At St. Joseph’s, our MFL curriculum is designed to develop not only our children’s language skills, but also their love of learning a language. It progressively develops language skills through regularly taught lessons. This allows children to acquire new language then use and apply it in a range of different scenarios and topics. Children are encouraged and supported to develop their speaking and listening skills through conversational work, singing activities and games. As their confidence and skill grows, children record their work through pictures, captions and sentences.

All children in KS2 will have regular language lessons with their class teacher. We currently use Twinkl and a range of other resources to support our teaching of French. Areas covered include: numbers, colours, house and home, in town, food and drink, the classroom, clothes and hobbies.

Impact

It is intended that when children leave St. Joseph’s, they will have a natural curiosity and confidence to explore other countries, cultures and languages, accepting that, in a multi-lingual society, it is a valuable skill to be able to communicate effectively with others in another language. They will be engaged and prepared to continue language learning at High School.