Intent
At St Luke’s, we teach Modern Foreign Languages in order to provide an opening to other cultures, fostering pupils’ curiosity and deepening their understanding of the world.
In Reception and Key Stage One, the focus is on ensuring children have an understanding and appreciation of languages and take pride in home languages and multilingualism.
In Key stage 2, pupils learn French through ‘Language Angels’. The teaching provides an appropriate balance of spoken and written language with the focus being on practical communication. We aim to enable pupils to understand and communicate ideas, facts and feelings in speech and writing. We provide opportunities for pupils to study a range of writing genres in French – stories, plays, instructions, narratives, letters and factual recounts. Language proficiency goes hand in hand with Intercultural Understanding so at appropriate points in the year children will learn about key traditions in the French speaking world.
The aim of teaching Modern Foreign Languages at our school is:
- To develop pupil’s love and appreciation of the many community languages within school and the wider world thereby equipping pupils to become world citizens. In Key Stage 2, the French curriculum aims to foster a love of this unique curriculum area through providing fun, varied and engaging lessons.
- To develop and promote the courage and confidence to practise new skills within an environment of shared learning, trust and experimentation.
- To provide the children the hope that they have the foundations to increase their fluency in French as they move through their education and when encountering and learning further languages in the future.
Implementation
At St Luke’s, the National Curriculum is the core of our MFL curriculum.
Our curriculum is designed to follow a clear sequence of skills and progression across the 4 modalities of Speaking, Listening, Reading and Writing through the scheme ‘Language Angels’. These are mapped out progressively on the long term progression document throughout Years 3 – 6. Learning is arranged in Topic areas all of which provide opportunities to develop and review skills in the 4 modalities.
Impact
By the end of Key Stage 2, we aim for all children to achieve a basic level of understanding and fluency in French so that they are able to understand and communicate ideas, facts and feelings in speech and writing.
We evaluate the extent to which children are retaining skills and knowledge using a range of approaches:
– Regular feedback, marking and pupil voice feedback
– Regular practice, retrieval and review activities within each lesson to encourage automaticity of recall.
– Planned, termly assessment points linked to key objectives and covering the 4 modalities of Speaking, Listening, Reading and Writing
– Subject monitoring including work scrutinies