St Mary's Catholic Primary School, Swindon

At St Mary’s, we aim for pupils to develop a genuine interest and positive curiosity about foreign languages. We chose to teach French as this supports their transition into our local secondary schools that also teach French.  Learning a second language provides the opportunity for pupils to explore relationships between language and identity and develop a deeper understanding of other cultures and the world around them. We anticipate that our pupils will be able to effectively communicate and hold conversations in French by the end of Year 6. We intend for our pupils to feel confident in taking language studies beyond Key Stage Two and ultimately be working towards becoming a life-long language learner. We anticipate that our pupils will be able to effectively communicate and hold conversations

Our school community values the variety of languages spoken by its members. We celebrate the fact that many of our children already speak an additional language and that many members of our staff team and families are multilingual. Throughout our curriculum, we have a strong focus on effective communication and a culture of loving and appreciating language.

Pupils begin learning French in Year 3, with early exposure to the language beginning in Reception through rhymes and greetings. There is an importance placed on memory recall as well as developing children’s phonic awareness. Both work hand in hand to support children confidently and accurately pronouncing words in an increasingly accurate accent.

Pupils in Key Stage Two have weekly French lessons throughout the year. Our teachers are supported by the Language Angels scheme of work and other high-quality resources to plan and teach engaging lessons broken into small, progressive steps with opportunities for meaningful practise and review. Our MFL lead works closely with Key Stage Two teachers to provide support and monitor the progress of children.

The four key language learning skills; listening, speaking, reading and writing, will be taught and all necessary grammar will be covered in an age-appropriate way across Key Stage Two. This allows pupils to use and apply their learning in a variety of contexts, laying down solid foundations for future language learning.

As each year passes, units increase in level of challenge and linguistic and grammatical complexity. Pupils move from Early Learning Units through to Intermediate Units and into the most advanced, Progressive Units. Early Learning Units will start at basic noun and phonetic level and will teach pupils how to formulate short, concise phrases. As pupils move further into the Intermediate and Progressive Units, they will be exposed to longer texts and will be encouraged to form their own responses, based on a much wider bank of vocabulary and grammatical knowledge. They will have the ability to create longer pieces of spoken and written text and will be encouraged to use a variety of conjunctions, adverbs, adjectives, opinions and justifications.