Intent

At St Michael’s, we aim to instil a love of language learning and an awareness of other cultures in our pupils. We want pupils to develop the confidence to communicate in French for practical purposes, using both written and spoken French.

Through our scheme of work, we aim to give pupils a foundation for language learning that encourages and enables them to apply their skills to learning further languages, developing a strong understanding of the English language, facilitating future study and opening opportunities to visit, study and work in other countries in the future.

The French scheme of work supports pupils to meet the National curriculum end of Key stage 2 attainment targets.

Implementation

We use the Kapow scheme of work, which we are confident meets the National Curriculum requirements for MFL.

The French scheme of work is designed with three knowledge strands that run throughout our units with knowledge building cumulatively. These are:

·         Phonics

·         Vocabulary

·         Grammar

This knowledge can then be applied within our skills strands, which also run throughout each unit in the scheme:

·         Language comprehension (listening and reading)

·         Language production (speaking and writing)

Our National Curriculum coverage shows which of our units cover each of the National Curriculum attainment targets as well as each of the strands.

Our Progression of skills and knowledge shows the skills and knowledge that are taught within each year group and how these skills develop to ensure that attainment targets are securely met by the end of Key Stage 2.

Through the French scheme, pupils are given opportunities to communicate for practical purposes around familiar subjects and routines. The scheme provides balanced opportunities for communication in both spoken and written French, although in Year 3 the focus is on developing oral skills, before incorporating written French in Year 4 and beyond.

The scheme is a spiral curriculum, with key skills and vocabulary revisited repeatedly with increasing complexity, allowing pupils to revise and build on their previous learning. Cross-curricular links are included throughout our French units, allowing children to make connections and apply their language skills to other areas of their learning.

Lessons incorporate a range of teaching strategies from independent tasks, paired and group work including role-play, language games and language detective work.

The Kapow scheme of work has support for teachers, including videos, to support them with the subject knowledge required to teach high quality French lessons.

Impact

We expect children to leave St Michael’s with the following skills:

·         To be able to engage in purposeful dialogue in practical situations and express and opinion.

·         Make increasingly accurate attempts to read unfamiliar words, phrases and short texts.

·         Speak aloud with confidence and accuracy in pronunciation.

·         Demonstrate an understanding of spoken language by listening and responding appropriately.

·         Use a bilingual dictionary to support their language learning.

·         Be able to identify word classes in a sentence and apply grammatical rules they have learnt.

·         Have developed an awareness of cognates and near-cognates and be able to use them to tackle unfamiliar words in French, English and other languages.

·         Be able to construct short texts on unfamiliar topics.

·         Meet the end of KS2 expectations as outlined in the National curriculum for languages.

We monitor the impact of our French curriculum in the following ways:

·         Formative assessment in each lesson

·         Discussions with pupils and teachers about their enjoyment and learning of French

·         Learning walks

·         Summative assessment will be recorded on OTrack at the end of the Summer Term