French

Rationale

“To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world” Chinese Proverb.

Intent

At St Mary Bourne Primary School children are taught to develop an interest in learning other languages in a way that is enjoyable and stimulating while promoting mutual respect for another culture. We encourage children’s confidence and strive to stimulate and encourage children’s curiosity about language. We strive to embed the skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing necessary to enable children to use and apply their French learning in a variety of contexts and lay the foundations for future language learning.

Our MFL curriculum is designed to progressively develop children skills in languages, through regular taught lessons. Children progressively acquire, use and apply a growing bank of vocabulary organised around topics, including rich authentic texts.

Implementation

Children are encouraged and supported to develop their speaking and listening skills through conversational work, singing activities and games. As confidence and skills grow, children record their work through pictures, captions and sentences. Lessons are sequenced so that prior learning is considered and opportunities for revision of language and grammatical concepts are built into lessons alongside the introduction of new skills. Visual prompts are used to reinforce vocabulary learnt.

Impact

Our French curriculum will ensure all pupils develop key language learning skills, as set out by the National Curriculum, as well as sparking 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 authentic sources
• speak with increasing confidence, fluency and spontaneity, finding ways of communicating what they want to say, including through discussions 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