French

Minet Junior School focuses on teaching French as its modern foreign language; however, it also helps to promote and develop a broader intercultural understanding through assemblies that are based on celebrations from around the world.

French is taught once a week across the school by a specialist teacher from the PrimaryPPACover company. As there are 47 different languages spoken at Minet, we teach French to further develop the pupil’s communicative skills and to encourage intercultural knowledge and understanding. Furthermore, we want to nurture a lifelong passion and curiosity for languages and to consolidate the skills for future language learning. 

Intent

As part of our learning in French, we aim to:

• Develop and encourage pupil’s curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world.
• Introduce the learning of the French language and the understanding of its culture in an enjoyable and stimulating way.
• 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.

Implementation

Lessons are delivered weekly by a MFL specialist in a half-hour session during PPA. The school uses the " PrimaryPPACover" scheme of work to support the teaching and learning of French. The scheme provides resources that ensure clear progression for the development of speaking and listening and vocabulary acquisition. It uses a variety of techniques to encourage children to have an active engagement with French, such as games, role play, action songs and rhymes, as well as a range of quality materials for reading and writing. Units are progressive within themselves, as subsequent lessons within a unit build on the language and knowledge taught in previous lessons.  As pupils progress through the lessons in a unit they will build their knowledge and develop the complexity of the language they use.

Children progressively acquire, use and apply a growing bank of vocabulary organised around topics. Children are encouraged and supported to develop their speaking and listening skills with accurate pronunciation and intonation through conversational work and singing activities. Children regularly take part in fun games in order to develop awareness of basic French words and phrases. We build children’s confidence through praise for any contribution they make in the foreign language, however tentative. As confidence and skill grows, children record their work through a range of tailored activities to ensure that all children can access the MFL curriculum that is outlined in the National Curriculum.

In addition, we promote links to our Knowledge-based Curriculum (celebrating diversity) and RE/PSHE (other cultures) to facilitate a whole school approach to foreign language learning along with improved cultural awareness.

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:

• 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 and communication 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.

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

• Observing children speaking and listening in another language.
• Marking of written work.
• Interviewing the pupils about their learning (pupil voice).
• Learning walks.
• Looking at books from across the school for consistency and continuous progress.