French Curriculum

Intent

At Burrough Green CofE Primary Academy, our intent is to provide all of our children with a quality education of Modern Foreign Languages that helps them to develop a love of learning about other languages and cultures whilst providing a wider understanding of the world. We also aim to build on children’s ‘cultural capital’ so that children develop a knowledge and understanding of the rich diversity between cultures in our community, the UK and the wider world. Children in Years 2-6 are taught French following a progressive and comprehensive scheme of work (Rigolo). The ultimate aim is that pupils will feel confident engaging in spoken French, develop skills in reading, listening and writing, and know how important languages will be in their future. We hope that all pupils will develop a genuine interest and curiosity in languages, finding them enjoyable and exciting and show a desire to continue their language learning past KS2. Our intention is that our MFL curriculum also fully supports our core drivers of academic excellence and life-long learning so that the children are equipped to carry on learning beyond their primary education.

Implementation

Our whole curriculum is shaped by our school vision, which aims to enable all children, regardless of background, ability, additional needs, to flourish to develop the knowledge and skills to be life-long learners. We teach the National Curriculum, supported by a clear skills and knowledge progression framework using a scheme of work. 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.

The MFL curriculum is taught to Years 2 - 6 children by a primary language specialist teacher. To promote active learning of French, a range of teaching methods are implemented to ensure that the children are developing their linguistic skills through listening, speaking, reading and writing in order to be secondary ready. Children are taught a strong awareness of phonology and the importance of grammatical structures so that knowledge gained can be applied to different contexts and topics in French. Children are taught a range of vocabulary which is carefully considered, so children can apply this across and beyond topics. Activities are cross-curricular and consist of actions, rhymes, stories, song, drama, grammar focus, video clips, sentence structure, dictionary work and many more creative ways to extend, embed and combine language skills.

Children in EYFS and KS1 are not directly taught by a specialist, but they are exposed to songs, rhymes and simple vocabulary to prepare them for KS2 French (see the EYFS/KS1 programme of study below). 

Impact

Through the high quality first teaching of French, evidence from the children’s books, assessment, learning walks, pupil voice, display and lessons will show the impact of the subject in the following ways:

• Children will be able to communicate with each other in French.
• Children will become aware that a language has a structure, and that the structure differs from one language to another.
• Children will develop their language through development of the four key skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing.
• Children will enrich their language learning by developing an understanding of the French culture.
• Children will transfer to KS3 effectively and successfully and will be well-prepared to continue and develop their language skills.