MFL

INTENT:

The intention of St Stephen’s Catholic Primary School is to provide a high-quality MFL curriculum which will enable pupils to develop the knowledge and skills required to provide the foundations for life-long language learning. The intent is that all pupils will develop a genuine interest and positive curiosity about foreign languages, finding them enjoyable and stimulating. Learning a foreign language will also offer pupils the opportunity to explore relationships between language and identity, develop a deeper understanding of other cultures and the world around them with a better awareness of self, others and cultural differences.

IMPLEMENTATION:

Organisation and Curriculum Coverage

 Teachers create a positive attitude to MFL learning within their classrooms and reinforce an expectation that all pupils are capable of achieving high standards in MFL. Our target language is French, which is taught throughout Key Stage 2. Our approach to the teaching and learning of French involves the following:

• French is delivered through lessons developed by Language Angels. Each year group’s programme consists of 3 units of 6 lessons, which are taught for a minimum 1 hour every other week. These units are preceded by the relevant French Phonetics lesson(s) for each year group. This promotes depth in the teaching and learning of each of the MFL strands of Phonics, Vocabulary and Grammar. Every unit includes a focus on each of these areas, feeding into the skills of Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing.
• Language Angels provides a broad but comprehensive experience of primary French that systematically covers the objectives of the National Curriculum for England.
• Planning involves teachers creating engaging lessons, often involving high-quality resources to aid understanding of conceptual knowledge.
• Children will progressively acquire, use and apply a growing bank of vocabulary, language skills and grammatical knowledge organised around age-appropriate topics and themes, building blocks of language into more complex, fluent and authentic language.
• The planning of different levels of challenge and which units to teach at each stage of the academic year will be addressed dynamically and will be reviewed in detail annually. Lessons offering appropriate levels of challenge and stretch will be taught at all times to ensure pupils learn effectively, continuously building their knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, the language they are learning.
• Children will build on previous knowledge gradually, as their French lessons continue to recycle, revise and consolidate previously learnt language whilst building on all four language skills: Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing.

• Teachers use precise questioning in class to test knowledge and skills, and assess pupils regularly to identify those children with gaps in learning, so that all pupils keep up.
• Teachers ensure that the quality and precision of the pronunciation of the language that children hear and speak are key factors in developing their linguistic skills. This can be achieved through the use of the sound files provided within the Language Angels scheme, as well as modelling by the Class Teacher.
• Activities should be planned to meet the needs of all pupils. Differentiation is achieved through careful planning and organisation. Learners should be supported and challenged to progress within French. Differentiation enables all students to engage in the curriculum by providing learning tasks and activities that are tailored to their needs and abilities. Pupils are encouraged to work in groups or individually, where appropriate. Lessons will incorporate challenge sections and desk-based activities that will be offered will have three levels of stretch and differentiation, to be used at the discretion of the Class Teacher.

• Units are progressive within themselves as subsequent lessons within a unit build on the language and knowledge taught in previous lessons. As pupils progress though the lessons in a unit, they will build their knowledge and develop the complexity of the language they use. We think of the progression within the 6 lessons in a unit as ‘language Lego’. We provide blocks of language knowledge and, over the course of a 6-week unit, encourage pupils to build more complex and sophisticated language structures with their blocks of language knowledge.
• Lessons can be supplemented by the songs and games provided within the scheme.
• A French working wall should be visible within all KS2 classrooms and should include the current vocabulary, phonemes and grammatical concepts being studied. This learning must also be referred to outside of the bi-weekly French lesson.

IMPACT:

The successful approach to French results in a fun, engaging, high-quality curriculum, that provides children with the foundations and knowledge for successful language learning at Key Stage 3 and beyond. As well as each subsequent lesson within a unit being progressive, the teaching type organisation of Language Angels units also directs, drives and guarantees progressive learning and challenge. Units increase in level of challenge, stretch and linguistic and grammatical complexity as pupils move through Key Stage 2, as units in each subsequent year require more knowledge and application of skills than the previous one. Activities contain progressively more text and lessons will have more content as the children become more confident and ambitious with the foreign language they are learning. Children at St Stephen’s Catholic Primary School overwhelmingly enjoy French and this results in motivated learners who acquire sound linguistic understanding in conjunction with the nine key skills as part of our curriculum offer.