St Paul's Catholic Primary School

MFL: French at St Paul’s

Intent

It is our intent at St Paul’s Catholic Primary School to provide our children with a high-quality education in Modern Foreign Languages (MFL), which develops their love of learning about other languages and cultures and helps provide them with an understanding of the world.

We aim to build the children’s ‘cultural capital’ so that they have a knowledge and understanding of the richness and diversity between cultures. Key Stage 2 pupils at St Paul’s will be expected to achieve their full potential in their foreign language learning (French) - the 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 about languages, finding them enjoyable and exciting and show a desire to continue their language beyond primary school.

We believe that learning another language gives children a new and broader perspective on the world, encouraging them to understand their own cultures and those of others, which feeds into our whole school values of respect where many religions and cultures are represented.

Key Stage 2 Curriculum Overview

Implementation

Children develop their love of language learning and develop skills throughout their time in KS2 at St Paul’s.  To teach French we use "Language Angels", a progressive scheme of work. The French curriculum has a focus on speaking, listening, reading and writing skills, as well as making children aware of grammatical features of the French language.

Knowledge and Skills Progression

Teachers follow the sequence of lessons from this scheme of work adapted to suit our pupils covering a wide variety of topics and themes. Weekly lessons in Autumn 1 and Summer 1 are taught (30-45 minutes) ensuring progression by building on previous topics.  At the start of each lesson, teachers recap on prior learning.  Previous language will be revised, recalled and consolidated whenever possible and appropriate. Evidence of lessons taught are captured in French books. Performance is a key part of pupils’ French learning. The opportunities that we plan for this includes singing songs, drama / role play activities, and performing rhymes.  Other ways in which children foster a love of French is through active participation in lessons through video clips, sentence building activities and playing games.

Assessment and 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.

The children are assessed by:

1. Understanding and responding to spoken and written language from a variety of authentic sources

2. Speaking 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

3. Can write at varying length, for different purposes and audiences, using the variety of grammatical structures that they have learnt