Our vision for learning French at St Mary’s is to provide a high-quality and engaging curriculum for all children in Key Stage 2, enabling them to learn to communicate effectively in another language as well as understanding people from another culture.

Through subject specific learning blocks, allocated at regular intervals, we will enable our pupils in Key Stage 2 to:

• Cover all the requirements of the National Curriculum for MFL;
• Gain confidence and enjoyment in their ability to communicate their ideas and thoughts effectively in another language leading on to further study at Key Stage 3;
• Develop an awareness of their place in the global community;
• Begin to understand how communication can create communities which are wider than geographical boundaries;
• Value contributions of different peoples and cultures.

St Mary’s seeks to encourage understanding and tolerance between people of all cultures and languages and all children are encouraged to share their knowledge of languages and cultural events, spoken and celebrated at home.

The aim of the National Curriculum is for pupils to learn to communicate effectively – both verbally and in written form – in another language.

The purpose should lead to being able to communicate in practical situations, to understand different viewpoints and thought processes and to allow children to access seminal texts in another language. It relates to a wider aspiration that pupils learn that they are citizens of a global community and should support their understanding of the need for wider understanding between countries and cultures, linking to aims for SMSC learning.

Aims of the Language Curriculum

The national curriculum for languages aims to ensure that all pupils:

• 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.

Listening
From the beginning of the French programme in year 3, children are taught active listening skills, learning to distinguish the different sounds and patterns of a foreign language. The children build their ability from listening to single words and sounds, to beginning to distinguish detail in an unfamiliar story.

Oracy
Throughout the languages curriculum, children are given rich opportunities to rehearse using French to discuss their views,
opinions and wider lives. They are given the opportunity to engage in purposeful conversations, for example, buying tickets or describing their homes and families, as well as using language to tell, instruct and gain information. Spoken language activities and practice underpin each activity in the French curriculum and provide children with the confidence to express themselves in another language from their mother tongue.

Vocabulary
Vocabulary forms a key part of our wider curriculum and in French is taught discretely in every lesson. Children begin to build a bank of vocabulary throughout their journey through KS2, allowing them to develop more detailed responses and descriptions in their French language work. ‘Vital Vocabulary’ is taught and applied, both verbally and in writing, in every
French lesson.