Modern Foreign Languages- French Curriculum

‘Learning a foreign language is a liberation from insularity and provides an opening to other cultures. A high-quality languages education should foster pupils’ curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world. The teaching should enable pupils 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 pupils to study and work in other countries.’ (National Curriculum, 2014).

Aims

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.

Curriculum Intent

At St. Martin’s C of E (VA) Primary School, we believe that learning a modern foreign language is a vital part of children’s learning, which helps to prepare children for their secondary education. Learning a language has an important role to play in the preparation of our children’s futures, as it helps to develop confidence and raise cultural understanding and deepens their curiosity about the world around them. All children are provided with opportunities to explore French as a Modern Foreign Language through the skills of Speaking, Listening, Reading and Writing, whilst meeting the requirements of the National Curriculum.

Curriculum Implementation

At St. Martin’s, we use the Language Angels scheme of work and resources to ensure we offer a broad, vibrant and ambitious MFL curriculum that will inspire and excite our children. We use a wide variety of topics and themes that relate to other areas of the curriculum, whilst building on what children have learned previously.

Children acquire, use and apply a growing bank of vocabulary, language skills and grammatical knowledge organised around age-appropriate topics and themes. Cross-curricular topics allow French to become embedded in children’s learning. Lessons offering appropriate levels of challenge are taught at all times to ensure children learn effectively, continuously building their knowledge of and enthusiasm for the language they are learning. Our children learn through active participation in actions, rhymes, stories, song, grammar focus, video clips, sentence structure, dictionary work and may other creative ways to extend, embed and combine language skills.

Curriculum Impact

Topics increase in their level of challenge as children move from Early Learning topics through Intermediate topics and into the most challenging Progressive topics. Early Learning topics start at basic noun and article level and teach children how to formulate short phrases. By the time children reach progressive topics they have been exposed to much longer texts and are encouraged to formulate their own, more personalised responses based on a much wider bank of vocabulary, linguistic structures and grammatical knowledge. Children are able to create longer pieces of spoken and written language and are encouraged to use a variety of conjunctions, adverbs, adjectives, opinions and justifications. Children continuously build on their previous knowledge as they progress in their foreign language-learning journey, as previous language is recycled, revised, recalled and consolidated, where appropriate. Children discover and develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the French language.

MFL (French) Subject Lead: Mrs L. Lambert