French (MFL)

Growing Curious and Compassionate Communicators to Live in God’s World

 

 

Intent

At St Andrew’s CE Primary School, our French curriculum is underpinned by our school principles:

  • Wisdom - Learning language skills and developing understanding of other languages and cultures.
  • Grace - Showing grace to ourselves and others as we communicate, make mistakes and learn from them together.
  • Hope – Developing a positive attitude to other languages and cultures, as those who are able to communicate and thrive in a global society.

 

GROWING:

Our spiral curriculum, matched to the National Curriculum programme of study, enables children to build on their skills in French through each year of KS2. Opportunities are provided to develop all four skill areas (listening, speaking, reading and writing) as well as intercultural understanding and language learning skills. Lessons are engaging and structured to rehearse skills and then move children forward in their learning through a variety of creative activities.

CURIOUS AND COMPASSIONATE COMMUNICATORS:
Our lessons aim to nurture curiosity in our learners about languages and cultures. Through learning about another culture, with its traditions, celebrations, similarities and differences to our own, we can grow in cultural awareness and respect for others. Learning another language also encourages compassion and empathy for those for whom English isn’t their first language. Alongside giving learners the foundations for communicating in French, our intention is that learners will develop a view of themselves as communicators, for whom language is not a barrier to future study, work, travel or friendship.

TO LIVE IN GOD’S WORLD:
We believe that our programme of study at KS2 will prepare our learners well for the study of languages at secondary school and beyond. Many of the language skills they develop (such as confidence, a ‘have a go’ attitude, resilience in making mistakes and bouncing back from them, and social skills in supporting and being polite to other learners) are life skills that will benefit them far beyond the languages classroom. In exploring language and culture, we aim for our learners to develop a global outlook, opening the door for effective global citizenship.

  

Implementation and Impact

 We are transitioning to using the ‘Primary French Project’ scheme of work for French in KS2 (created by the Institut français du Royaume Uni), which ensures that our French curriculum content follows a clear sequence of progression. Objectives are mapped to the National Curriculum programme of study for Languages and also linked to the programme of study for English in KS2. Lessons (30 mins) are taught weekly by class teachers. The scheme is suitable for both specialists and non-specialists, providing clear lesson plans to follow, plus support (for example with pronunciation). Additional support is given by the French Lead as needed. Our lessons are planned to be engaging and make learning French fun. Each half-termly unit is topic-based, providing context for learning. Where possible, these are linked to the topics that are being studied in other curriculum areas and/or to cultural and seasonal events. Lessons are intended to be active and highly focused, with children working as a whole class, in small groups, or in mixed-ability pairs to complete tasks at their individual level. Work is differentiated in a variety of ways to accommodate children in the same class who are all at different stages of their language-learning journeys. Activities include games, stories, songs, puppets, phonics, grammar and sentence-building activities, rhymes, role-play and dictionary work. As the profile of languages is raised in the school, we hope to celebrate languages further by recognising the many languages spoken by children at St. Andrew’s and also through themed events. 

Impact

Activities from French lessons are recorded in individual books (currently being introduced), which evidence the progress that is made as children progress through KS2. This book is taken up with them to the next year group so that children are able to refer to previous learning and vocabulary.

Assessment tasks, both formative and summative, are included in our scheme of work. Teachers use the information provided by these tasks to adapt future lessons in order to address misconceptions and mistakes and revisit areas of learning.

Termly and end of year pupil outcomes are recorded in St Andrew’s tracking and assessment system. This information is used by teachers, the subject leader and SLT to identify patterns and gaps, and to plan for pupil progress.

 

French Photo Gallery

 

 

MFL curriculum documents