INTENT

Our modern foreign language curriculum fosters children's curiosity and deepens their understanding of the world. 

We believe that learning a modern foreign language is a vital part of children’s learning, which helps to prepare children for their secondary education. Learning a language has an important role to play in the preparation of our children’s futures, as it helps to develop confidence and raise cultural understanding and deepens their curiosity about the world around them. All children are provided with opportunities to explore French as a Modern Foreign Language through the skills of Speaking, Listening, Reading and Writing, whilst meeting the requirements of the National Curriculum.

At Middlemarch School, we use the Language Angels scheme of work and resources to ensure we offer a broad, vibrant and ambitious MFL curriculum that will inspire and excite our children. We use a wide variety of topics and themes that relate to other areas of the curriculum, whilst building on what children have previously learnt. 

IMPLEMENTATION

At Middlemarch, children progressively develop skills in French through well-planned, weekly, 45-minute lessons using the Language Angels Scheme of Work.

Children acquire, use and apply a growing bank of vocabulary (through the use of topic Vocabulary Lists), language skills and grammatical knowledge organised around age-appropriate topics and themes. Cross-curricular topics allow French to become embedded in children’s learning. Lessons offering appropriate levels of challenge are taught at all times to ensure children learn effectively, continuously building their knowledge of and enthusiasm for the language they are learning. Our children learn through active participation in actions, rhymes, stories, song, grammar focus, video clips, sentence structure, dictionary work and may other creative ways to extend, embed and combine language skills.

IMPACT

MFL at Middlemarch School will ensure all children develop key language learning skills, as set out by the National Curriculum, as well as a love of languages that develops year on year.

Topics increase in their level of challenge as children move from Early Learning topics through Intermediate topics and into the most challenging Progressive topics. Early Learning topics start at basic noun and article level and teach children how to formulate short phrases. By the time children reach progressive topics they will be exposed to much longer texts and will be encouraged to formulate their own, more personalised responses based on a much wider bank of vocabulary, linguistic structures and grammatical knowledge. They will be able to create longer pieces of spoken and written language and are encouraged to use a variety of conjunctions, adverbs, adjectives, opinions and justifications. Children continuously build on their previous knowledge as they progress in their foreign language-learning journey, as previous language is recycled, revised, recalled and consolidated, where appropriate. Children will discover and develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the French language.

Children are aware of their own learning goals and progression as each unit offers a pupil friendly self-assessment tool, so that all children can review their own learning at the end of each unit.