Intent

At St. Mark’s C of E Primary Academy, we believe that the learning of a language provides a valuable educational, social and cultural experience for our pupils. It helps them to develop communication skills in speaking, listening, reading and writing, with an aim of making substantial progress in one language. In addition, children’s knowledge of how language works will be developed to lay the foundations for further language learning in the future. 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.

Implementation

Children develop their love of language learning and develop skills throughout their time in school.

In KS2, children are taught in weekly sessions by Ms Perry, with class teachers reinforcing their learning outside of lessons. We aim for our children to develop an appreciation of songs and stories in French throughout their time at the school. 

Our school follows the KS2 Framework for Languages, which is adapted to meet the needs of our own children. Details of topics covered in each year group can be found on the French curriculum area of our school website. Children at St. Mark’s C of E Primary Academy have been advancing through this scheme of work. As we acknowledge children’s different learning styles, our children learn through active participation in actions, rhymes, stories, songs, grammar focus, video clips, sentence structure and many more creative ways to extend, embed and combine language skills. 

Our language curriculum is reinforced by a French day at School and our residential trips to France. Pupils in Years 5 and 6 have the opportunity to participate in a residential trip, during which they are able to put into practice their language learning and develop a wider cultural appreciation of the language they are studying. We believe this acts as a great motivation for language learning and develops historical and intercultural understanding.

Impact

Our French curriculum will ensure all pupils develop key language learning skills, as set out by the national curriculum, as well as 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 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