Modern Foreign Languages at Phoenix Community Primary School

Intent

It is our intent at Phoenix Community Primary School to provide all of our children with a high-quality education in Modern Foreign Languages, which develops their love of learning about other languages and cultures. Our current MFL taught is French, however we strive to provide children with opportunities to experience a range of other languages, especially those that are home languages of some of our pupils. It is our intention to ensure that by the end of our children’s primary education, they have acquired an understanding of both spoken and written French, confidence to speak in French with others and know how important other languages can be in their future.

Implementation

Our MFL curriculum is designed to develop not only our children’s language skills, but also their love of learning a language. It progressively develops language skills, through regularly taught lessons. This allows the children to acquire new language then use and apply it in a range of different scenarios and topics. Children are encouraged and supported to develop their speaking and listening skills through conversational work and games. This also links to our schools focus on oracy, this at the heart of our school ethos. As their confidence and skill grows, children record their work through pictures, captions and sentences, sometimes this is uploaded onto Seesaw for children and teachers to appraise their oracy.

All children in KS2 will have regular language lessons with their class teacher. We currently use ‘Linguascope’ to support our teaching of French and the magazine ‘Allons-y’ to develop reading skills.

Annually we celebrate European Day of Languages in September and follow a theme for that day. Children get the opportunity to engage in sports, music, art, cooking, games, scavenger hunts and many other activities on this day.

Impact

Our MFL curriculum will ensure all pupils develop key language learning skills 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

We also try, wherever possible, to link our French learning (especially the grammar aspects) to our English learning. This enables children to make links and further strengthen their skills in both areas of the curriculum.