“Learning a foreign language is a liberation from insularity and provides an opening to other cultures.  A high-quality languages education should foster pupils’ curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world.  The teaching should enable pupils to express their ideas and thoughts in another language and to understand and respond to its speakers, both in speech and in writing.  It should also provide opportunities for them to communicate for practical purposes, learn new ways of thinking and read great literature in the original language.  Language teaching should provide the foundation for learning further languages, equipping pupils to study and work in other countries.” National Curriculum

Rationale - Languages in the Primary Curriculum

The learning of a foreign language provides a valuable educational, social and cultural experience for the pupils.

As set out in the Curriculum a high-quality language education should encourage children’s curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world. The teaching should enable pupils to express their ideas and thoughts in another language and to understand and respond to its speakers, both in speech and in writing. It should also provide opportunities for them to communicate for practical purposes and learn new ways of thinking.

Language teaching should provide the foundation for learning further languages, equipping pupils to study and work in other countries.

Curriculum Aims

In teaching French we aim:

• To foster enjoyment and enrich the children’s experience.
• To develop the children’s language learning skills and foster a positive attitude to language learning.
• To enable pupils to understand and respond to spoken and written language from a variety of sources.
• To enable pupils to 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.
• To support pupils in beginning to write at varying lengths, for different purposes and audiences, using the variety of  grammatical structures that they have learnt.
• To help pupils discover and develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the language studied.
• To increase the children’s cultural awareness.
• To lay the foundations for further study in KS3 and beyond.
• To satisfy local and government requirements and follow the National Curriculum.

In endorsing the school’s Creative Curriculum principles, we specifically aim to:

• Provide a rich and varied input of the language, so that children hear and interact with the sounds and patterns of the new language
• Use active learning to engage and motivate.
• Use games, stories, poems and songs to maximise enjoyment.
• Embed languages in class routines and school life.
• Integrate language learning across the curriculum.

Curriculum Plan

Progression of Learning