French

Intent

We aim to deliver a high-quality French education with carefully chosen content and breadth to ensure pupils acquire a substantial foundation in both the language and the culture of France.  It is our intent that by the end of our children’s primary education, they have acquired an understanding of both spoken and written French, confidence to speak French with others, a good understanding of France and French culture and know how important other languages can be in their future. 

As with all subjects, each unit of study will have specific ‘sticky knowledge’ (the things we want the children to know or skills to be able to apply long term). These are guided by ‘Golden Threads’ that weave throughout all French learning and they are:  vocabulary and grammar development, culture & understanding of the world awareness and speaking and listening with accuracy and understanding.

Implementation

The French curriculum begins in Bramble class and each KS2 class receives an hour of French every week. In order to ensure and support good quality teaching of French, we use the Kapow scheme of work.  We chose this in order to ensure progression as it has planning for mixed year groups.  We also chose it as it is a comprehensive scheme that covers all elements of teaching and learning French, including France and French culture.  Additionally, our school focus on the importance of oracy in the primary years, feeds into French and the expectation that children will endeavour to speak out loud in French.

Impact

Our MFL curriculum will ensure all pupils develop key language learning skills set out by the national curriculum, as well as a love of languages and learning about other cultures.

These are as follows:

• understand and respond to spoken and written language from a variety of 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.

 We measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:

• Observing children speaking and listening in another language.
• Marking of written work.
• Images and videos of children completing speaking and listening activities.
• Pupil voice.
• Learning walks.