Languages
Challenging, enjoyable, exciting and relevant
Our approach to the Modern Foreign Language Curriculum is taught discretely to ensure depth and rigour, whilst being underpinned by the accelerated learning approach to teaching and learning. We teach French as our MFL by utilising the key concepts, principles and themes developed from the National Curriculum to create a range of progressive knowledge and skills through which the children are helped to grow and develop to succeed in 21st century Britain. This progressive curriculum allows a purposeful way of teaching and learning, enabling us to provide a more meaningful and sequential approach to the schema for French.
The MFL curriculum we offer is designed to meet the needs of all our pupils by providing purposeful contexts which engage our children. It is rich, varied, imaginative and ambitious and meets the needs of individual learners but can easily be adapted for pupils with additional needs. Through regular assessment, tasks are matched to the ability of each child through differentiated activities, providing a level of challenge that is stimulating for pupils.
The intent of our Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) curriculum in French is to provide a high-quality, engaging language education that lays the foundation for pupils to understand and respond to spoken and written language from authentic sources. Our curriculum is designed to develop confidence in speaking French, with a strong emphasis on three key areas: phonics, vocabulary, and grammar. In phonics, we focus on blending sounds to form words and segmenting words into their component sounds, which aids in pronunciation and reading skills. For vocabulary development, we use a variety of authentic materials and contexts to expand pupils' word knowledge, enabling them to express ideas and opinions creatively. Grammar instruction includes understanding basic structures appropriate to French, such as feminine and masculine forms, conjugation of high-frequency verbs and sentence construction.
Building progressively on taught skills
Modern Foreign Languages is taught discretely and it is delivered to raise interest, self-esteem, creativity and aspirations of all our children. The curriculum is rich and varied, which provides our pupils with the skills required for life in the 21st Century.
The Accelerated Learning Cycle, based on the work of Alastair Smith, is applied in all lessons. It stems from the idea of a supportive and challenging learning environment. The cycle has active engagement through multi-sensory learning, encourages the demonstrating understanding of learning in a variety of ways and the consolidation of knowing.
Ultimately, providing opportunities for children to personally develop by immersing themselves in another language and culture is at the heart of the MFL curriculum offer that we provide to the children through exploring a wide range of topics, in order to prepare them for life.
Our curriculum is designed with a core focus on retrieval practice, recognising its pivotal role in helping students know more and remember more. This intent is actualised through a dual approach: integrated retrieval within individual lessons and a structured, subject retrieval practice rota. In-session retrieval activities are carefully crafted to reinforce key concepts and knowledge, promoting immediate recall and application. Complementing this, our weekly retrieval practice rota systematically revisits content across various subjects, ensuring spaced repetition and interleaving of crucial information. This comprehensive strategy aims to strengthen neural connections, facilitate the transfer of knowledge to long-term memory and build increasingly complex mental models. By embedding retrieval practice as a fundamental aspect of our curriculum, we strive to enhance our pupils' ability to retain, recall and apply their learning effectively, thereby fostering deeper understanding and more robust academic progress.
Our curriculum is ambitious for all pupils, including those children with SEND. Curriculum designers and teachers have high expectations of what SEND pupils can achieve and the curriculum is not diluted or unnecessarily reduced for SEND pupils. Every pupil is different and so what works for each pupil varies. Pupil’s individual needs are considered and adaptations are planned to ensure the success of pupils in all subjects.
The way that our curriculum is designed ensures that chunks of learning are sequenced in a coherent way to enable all pupils, including those with SEND, to build on prior knowledge. Too much information at once can be a barrier to learning which is one of the reason why we have chosen half termly curriculum drivers.
Where pupils are identified with having complex needs, it may be appropriate to provide a personalised curriculum which will be based on individual needs and will retain ambition for the pupil.
Where working memory is an issue for pupils, including those with SEND, we look to reduce extraneous load as much as possible as well as identifying key information when teaching. This helps pupils to pay attention to the content which they are expected to learn. Adaptations to support individual pupils will be recorded on personal school support plans.
Pupils specific needs determine the types of adaptations which are required. These adaptations are in how the subject is taught rather than the content pupils are expected to learn. Where appropriate, learning will be chunked into smaller steps and pre-learning and consolidation time in planned in to support the progression in phonics, vocabulary and grammar. Teachers may need to make adaptations to ensure that SEND learners can access the curriculum, such as adapting authentic texts or allowing additional time for lots of effortful practice to acquire the initial language of a curriculum. Time is also planned to ensure pupils with SEND are pre-taught vocabulary that has been selected based on its frequency and capacity to be used in multiple situations to support their understanding.
Knowing more and remembering more
Formative assessment is ongoing throughout each lesson. It judges progress and enables the teacher to make flexible adaptations to their planned teaching.
Through this regular ongoing assessment, tasks are matched to the ability of each child through adapted activities and including adult support, thus providing a level of challenge that is stimulating for pupils and questioning skills.