Intent: The importance of learning a language
Offering a language education will foster children’s curiosity and deepen their understanding of the World. Language teaching should provide the foundation for learning further languages equipping pupils to study and work in other countries.
At St Augustine of Canterbury, our aim is to develop an enthusiastic and positive attitude to other languages and language learning, inclusive to every child. We are committed to providing all children from Y3 to Y6 with learning opportunities to engage in a modern foreign language. We believe that the learning of a language provides a valuable educational, social and cultural experience for our pupils. We will therefore strive to ensure that our planning is adapted to support specific needs of pupils, irrespective of background, gender, disability, ethnicity and socioeconomic background. We believe that all children should be given opportunities of success in languages and be supported in the process of learning languages.
Learning a language enriches the curriculum, providing excitement, enjoyment and challenges for children and teachers, helping to create enthusiastic learners and to develop positive attitudes to language learning throughout life. It helps them to develop communication skills, that lay the foundation for future language learning including key skills in speaking, listening, reading and writing. They will acquire language learning strategies for memorisation and retrieval as well as for listening, reading and understanding. They will 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 and will recognise some of the language patterns of French and how these differ or are similar to English.
The natural links between languages and other areas of the curriculum can enhance the overall teaching and learning experience. The skills, knowledge and understanding gained through learning a new language has an enormous impact on the development of children’s oracy and literacy. They will develop linguistic competence, extend their knowledge of how language works and explore similarities and differences between French and English developing an understanding of other cultures which will assist them and lay foundations for further language learning and foster curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world.
Implementation
The language we have selected to teach in Key Stage 2 at St Augustine of Canterbury is French.
To ensure the language skills of staff are developed and sustained, at St Augustine of Canterbury we have joined the Primary Languages Network (PLN) https://primarylanguages.network. It is a live scheme which is continually updated and revised in order to meet with current curriculum standards. Alongside the planning provided; the network also enriches this through accompanying power points, pod casts (spoken by native speakers) links to authentic literature, songs, games, culture points of reference, links to appropriate websites.
It provides all the materials, lesson by lesson planning, resources and support sound files and activities to enable our school to ensure progression in language learning across the four core skills and also the DfE 12 Attainment Targets of the National Curriculum. The MFL Co-ordinator will advise, work with and guide staff when required and uses the PLN to obtain current and up to date information.
To promote an active learning of languages a range of teaching methods are implemented to ensure that the children are developing their linguistic skills through listening, speaking, reading and writing in order to be secondary ready. Activities can consist of actions, rhymes, stories, song, drama, grammar focus, video clips, air writing, sentence structure, dictionary work, book making and many more creative ways to extend, embed and combine language skills and become more attuned to the sounds of the language and help their pronunciation and confidence.
The skills of reading and writing are, as in English, reinforced through the development of oracy. Children will become increasingly familiar with the relationship between the graphic representation and the sound of words and as their understanding of the language increases so does their confidence to write simple sentences and phrases. Children will also have opportunities to reflect on the English language and explore and compare the similarities and differences in how words have been formed.
The weekly lessons are designed to be approximately 45 minutes in length. 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. 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. French and language culture days celebration enables the whole school to be immersed in the inclusion of the culture and use the language in a meaningful context thus showing that learning a new language brings children into contact with the cultural diversity of other nations and countries and develops their intercultural understanding.
The Primary Languages Network Medium term plans allow for progression by new skills being taught each week, revision of previous lessons and consistently revising the fundamentals of the French language.
Children in KS1 will be exposed to languages discreetly throughout the day with the calling of registers, commands and any links they can make throughout the week. This will give children an earlier understanding of the basics of language learning and develop early acquisition skills, ready for their study of languages in the future.
Impact
Our MFL curriculum is planned to develop a love of language learning. Our curriculum ensures that children develop a knowledge of different languages, including the range of home languages spoken in our school. It is important that knowledge and skills of vocabulary come from a variety of learning experiences through the resources used in school. National Day of Languages and language celebration days will ensure that languages are celebrated throughout the school community and will provide a context for language learning.
We can monitor and measure the impact of our curriculum through:
· Self-evaluation
· Pipil assessment data
· Pupil voice questionnaires/discussion with pupils
· Staff meetings and staff audits
· Observing the children completing speaking and listening activities
· Learning walks
At St Augustine of Canterbury we are working toward effective progress across the four years of KS2. Training can be accessed via the Primary Language Network VLE.
The impact is demonstrated through the children’s learning outcomes by the end of KS2 where they will be able t
• 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 discussion and asking questions, and continually improving the accuracy of their pronunciation and intonation
• 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