Curriculum Area: Foreign Languages

Subject Leader: Miss Beck

At Brookfield Community Primary School, we aim to inspire a love of languages and develop pupils’ confidence in communicating in French. Through engaging and carefully sequenced lessons, children build their skills in speaking, listening, reading and writing. Pupils learn useful vocabulary, phrases and grammar while also developing their pronunciation and understanding of French culture. Previous learning is regularly revisited so that children can make connections, remember more and become increasingly confident and independent language learners.

Intent

Our Foreign Languages curriculum aims to ensure we offer a relevant, broad, vibrant and ambitious foreign languages curriculum that will inspire and excite our pupils using a wide variety of topics and themes. At Brookfield Community Primary School, we believe that learning a foreign language is a necessary part of being a member of a multi-cultural society and provides an opening to other cultures.

The national curriculum for Foreign Languages aims to ensure that all pupils should be taught 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
• understand basic grammar appropriate to the language being studied, including (where relevant): feminine, masculine and neuter forms and the conjugation of high-frequency verbs; key features and patterns of the language; how to apply these, for instance, to build sentences; and how these differ from or are similar to English

We aim to motivate and inspire children through a curriculum that stimulates, engages and challenges all learners. Our curriculum aims to develop children’s curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world. Our teaching will enable children to express their ideas and thoughts using another language and to understand and respond to its speakers, both in speech and in writing.

Foreign Languages at Brookfield is designed to inspire curiosity and a love of languages that pupils will strengthen and develop ensuring effective progression across all year groups. Specific vocabulary for each unit is taught and built upon and effective questioning to communicate ideas is encouraged.

Our School Mission Statement of ‘Many hearts make a school’ and our Learning Powers, are at the heart of our curriculum and all that we do at Brookfield Community Primary School.

Implementation

In Foreign Languages, we implement an inclusive curriculum that meets the needs of all pupils, including those with special educational needs and the more able. The curriculum is progressive and based on the needs of our children.

French is taught in KS2 for 30 minutes per week. We teach French throughout KS2 from the objectives specified in the 2014 national curriculum. We use ‘Language Angels’ to support planning, progression and execution of the national curriculum objectives, which are adapted to suit the context of our school.

At the beginning of each unit, children share their prior knowledge, which informs planning and teaching. A series of stimulating lessons are planned, with clear knowledge and skills -based learning objectives and subject-specific vocabulary. 

Impact

Our well-planned Foreign Languages curriculum ensures that children are given essential knowledge and skills. Pupils will continuously build on their previous knowledge as they progress in their foreign language learning journey. Previous language will be recycled, revised, recalled and consolidated whenever possible and appropriate.

Teachers will have a clear overview of what they are working towards and if they are meeting these criteria. They will use the long-term planning documents to ensure the correct units are being taught to the correct classes at each stage of the scholastic year. Short-term planning is also provided in the form of unit overviews (covering the 'Sticky Learning' for each 6-week unit) and individual lesson plans laying out the learning aims and intentions of each individual lesson within a unit. These planning documents ensure that teachers know what to teach and how to teach it in each lesson, across whole units and across each scholastic term.