Modern Foreign Language

 

Rationale

A high-quality language education at St John’s CE Primary School will foster pupils’ curiosity, build their confidence and deepen their understanding of the world and other cultures. Through learning French, pupils will develop the skills to express their ideas and thoughts and to understand and respond to others, both orally and in writing.

Our aim is to provide every pupil with opportunities to develop their language skills through a range of engaging and meaningful activities, including songs, rhymes, stories, games, conversation and cultural learning. We want pupils to develop a positive attitude towards language learning, appreciate similarities and differences between cultures, and understand the value of learning another language. By building their vocabulary, pronunciation, listening, speaking, reading and writing skills, we aim to equip pupils with a strong foundation for further language learning and future opportunities.

 

Aims

The national curriculum for languages aims to ensure that all pupils:

  • 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
  • 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.

 

Intended Outcomes

By the end of Key Stage 2 pupils should be helped to:

  • Listen attentively to spoken language and show understanding by joining in and responding
  • Explore the patterns and sounds of language through songs and rhymes and link the spelling, sound and meaning of words
  • Engage in conversations; ask and answer questions; express opinions and respond to those of others; seek clarification and help
  • Speak in sentences, using familiar vocabulary, phrases and basic language structures
  • Develop accurate pronunciation and intonation so that others understand when they are reading aloud or using familiar words and phrases
  • Present ideas and information orally to a range of audiences
  • Read carefully and show understanding of words, phrases and simple writing
  • Appreciate stories, songs, poems and rhymes in the language
  • Broaden their vocabulary and develop their ability to understand new words that are introduced into familiar written material, including through using a dictionary
  • Write phrases from memory, and adapt these to create new sentences, to express ideas clearly
  • describe people, places, things and actions orally and in writing

 

Pupils will develop their understanding of the phonology, vocabulary and grammatical structures of French. They will learn how to apply familiar patterns to build sentences and recognise similarities and differences between French and English.