Modern Foreign Language
To learn a foreign language and foster our pupils' curiousity of different cultures; unlocking their potential.
Intent:
- Develop resilience in language learning as well as enjoyment of it through a challenging scheme of work.
- Acquire language learning strategies for memorisation and retrieval as well as for listening, reading and understanding.
- Develop the skill of how to use a bi-lingual dictionary to decode unfamiliar language.
- Be able to manipulate language to speak or write sentences creatively using prior knowledge of grammar and key features; with and without a dictionary.
- Have a sound grasp of the key sounds of the French language and their corresponding graphemes and be able to apply this knowledge when speaking, listening and reading aloud.
- Recognise some of the language patterns of French and how these differ or are similar to English.
- Appreciate and be able to copy the sound of the language at text level through songs, stories and rhymes.
- Have a deeper understanding of cultural differences and similarities.
- Demonstrate substantial progress in learning French and work towards or meet the targets of the KS2 Programme of Study for Languages.
Implementation
- The lesson plans are designed to be 30 minutes in length for Years 3/4 and 45 minutes in length for Years 5/6. There are follow-up activities to each lesson to increase the exposure time in a week.
- The lessons are designed to be progressive and build on prior learning, moving from word to sentence level over the four years.
- In Years 3 and 4 the same structures and grammatical knowledge are revisited in both cycles, however, the vocabulary is different.
- In Years 5 and 6 some of the same structures are revisited but only by completing the two year cycle will all the knowledge and skills be covered.
- The lesson plans include ideas for support for the less able and to extend the more able.
- The lesson activities are challenging, varied and interactive and develop listening, reading, speaking and writing skills.
- Interactive whiteboard resources with audio support are provided; purchase of a set of storybooks and phonics book is a requisite to access the scheme and additional resources are recommended particularly for songs and rhymes.
- The choice of vocabulary ensures exposure to all the key phonic sounds and ability to build sentences using grammatical knowledge.
- Who teaches the scheme to ensure high quality lessons is at the discretion of the school but linguistic up-skilling and methodology training is available to support its delivery as well as detailed lesson plans linked to ready-made resource templates and audio recordings of stories and rhymes read by a native speaker.
- It is expected that formative assessment in each lesson informs the planning and teaching of subsequent lesson plans.
Impact
- The lesson plans indicate which activity is an opportunity to assess progress and is linked to the KS2 targets and in particular to those of the appropriate year group as detailed above.
- A teacher assessment grid is provided to record attainment of each target for each skill in each year group and to track progress.
- The completed activities in the accompanying workbooks gather evidence of the listening, reading and writing targets.
- Evidence of speaking activities can be gathered by making audio recordings of the suggested activities in the lesson plans.
- Children self-assess their progress at the end of each section of work using a traffic light system and comment on their grasp of the new knowledge. In addition, there is space for teachers to provide a written response.
- The use of the ‘transition document’ is encouraged to relay information to feeder secondary schools about prior language learning.
- Based on the evidence of the above records of achievement and progress, teachers can inform parents/guardians of this, using report statements which relate to the expected targets of each year group under the headings ‘emerging, expected and exceeding.
- To enhance the impact on enjoyment and intercultural understanding, consider organising language events and competitions; making penfriend links; provide access to out-of-school online materials; take-home bags of resources etc.
- All of the above provides evidence that the ‘statements of intent’ are met
