Languages

We believe that the learning of a foreign language provides a valuable educational, social and cultural experience for our pupils. It helps them to develop communication skills including the key skills of speaking and listening and extends their knowledge of how language works. Learning another language gives children a new perspective on the world, encouraging them to understand their own cultures and those of others.

At Bidston Village C.E. Primary School our aims are to:

• Ensure children have the opportunity to understand and respond to spoken and written French from a variety of authentic sources

• Support children to 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

• Allow children time to write at varying length, for different purposes and audiences, using the variety of grammatical structures that they have learnt

• Promote discovery and development of an appreciation of a range of writing in French.

• Allow children to achieve specific MFL skills as set down in the schools scheme of work and to celebrate their success

• Allow staff and children to gain confidence in and enjoyment from, the use of French through creativity and innovation.

• Allow staff to develop professionally by enhancing their teaching skills, management skills, administrative skills and communication.

Our MFL curriculum has been chosen to progressively develop skills in French. Our lessons ensure children acquire a bank of vocabulary organised around topics, which build on previous knowledge from units already studied. French is evident outside of the classroom with signs around the school displayed to make language learning more meaningful and purposeful.

Details of individual year group plans can be found here.

Teaching

Languages lessons

Children are taught these specific skills, concepts and vocabulary in weekly French lessons, with their class teacher, following the KS2 scheme of work. The content of these sessions is reinforced during the week. Languages embedded into other lessons where appropriate, teachers give children opportunities to practice their foreign language in the context of lessons in other subject areas. For instance, some instructions may be given in French; or children may count in French, while carrying out a numeracy activity. This acts to reinforce the vocabulary and structures they have learned.

‘Incidental’ language

We aim for languages to be a part of the day-to-day life of the school. For example, teachers can use the foreign language to give simple classroom instructions (‘come in quietly’; ‘listen’; ‘look’), to ask questions (‘who wants school dinner?’; ‘what’s today’s date?’) and to take the register. Children can be encouraged to respond using the language they have learned, and sometimes teachers and pupils develop new language skills together, teachers acting as role models in the learning process. This integrated approach is a strong model for teaching and learning, giving children opportunities to use and develop their language for communicating in stress-free real-life contexts.

Inclusion

Teaching of MFL at Bidston Village CofE Primary is fully inclusive. No child is excluded because of a learning difficulty, or because they have English as an additional language. Experience has indeed shown that such children can derive particular benefit from taking part in MFL learning activities. These activities are planned in such a way as to encourage the full and active participation of all pupils. Work is differentiated as appropriate to the needs of individual children. Pairs and groups for collaborative work may be made up in different ways, depending on the task. Children who are linguistically gifted and talented are targeted with more demanding questions and given the opportunity to manipulate and extend the target language in pair and group work, therefore working at Mastery. Some tasks include a wider vocabulary and pupils are given the chance to choose what they include in their own work.

Our MFL curriculum will ensure all pupils develop key language learning skills set out by the national curriculum, as well as a love of languages and learning about other cultures. Pupil and Staff voice is also used to further develop the MFL curriculum. This is achieved through annual surveys of all KS2 pupils and staff.