MFL - French

Intent

At St Martin’s, we are committed to promoting a positive attitude to language learning amongst pupils and staff and developing an awareness and appreciation of cultural similarities and differences. We believe that learning a foreign language provides a valuable educational, social and cultural experience for all pupils and that it should be taught in a way that fosters children’s curiosity and deepens their understanding of the world. We endeavour to offer a relevant, broad, vibrant and ambitious French curriculum that will inspire and excite our pupils using a wide variety of topics and themes. Our aim is for children to develop communication and literacy skills that lay the foundation for future learning of languages.

Implementation

Mrs Mabbutt (HLTA) teaches one 45-minute French lesson a week to each of the classes from year 4 to 6. Year 3 have French introduced in smaller bite size sessions by their class teacher.

All children have access to a high quality French curriculum using ‘Language Angels’- a resource that incorporates games, stories and songs to ensure learning is interactive and engaging, thus further embedding key vocabulary and skills. The lesson resources incorporate pre-recorded vocabulary by a native French speaker, ensuring children are being taught the correct pronunciation.

Each year, it builds on learning from the previous year, ensuring that children make good progress. Topics increase in their level of challenge as the children move from Early Learning topics to those at an Intermediate level. Early Learning units start at basic noun and article level and teach children how to form short, simple phrases.

By the time pupils reach Intermediate units they will be exposed to longer text and will be encouraged to formulate their own, more personalised responses based on a wider bank of vocabulary, linguistic structures and grammatical knowledge. Pupils will continuously build on their previous knowledge as they progress through the primary phase. Previous language will be recycled, revised, recalled and consolidated whenever possible.

Impact

French lessons at St Martin’s will ensure all children develop key language learning skills, as set out by the National Curriculum, as well as a love of languages that develops year on year. At the end of each unit, the children are assessed in reading, writing, listening and speaking. Through focusing on these key skills, the children will: 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 vocabulary and grammatical structures that they have learnt.