Intent 

A high-quality languages education should foster pupils’ curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world. The teaching should enable pupils to express their ideas and thoughts in another language and to understand and respond to its speakers, both in speech and in writing.’ (National Curriculum 2014) 

To enable our children to celebrate and welcome differences in our world, it is vital that they have an awareness and understanding of different languages and countries.  We hope that through learning a foreign language, pupils will develop as global citizens as well as acquiring skills that will enable them to communicate orally or in writing in another language.   

Implementation 

How do we deliver MFL (French) at Crookhill Primary School? 

We teach French across Key Stage 2. The school uses the ”Rigalo” scheme from Oxford Owl to support the teaching and learning of French. This provides clear progression for the development of speaking and listening and vocabulary acquisition. There are resources to support the teaching and learning opportunities for pupils.  Each year group (3-6) has a number of units that will be taught throughout the year.   

They use a variety of the following techniques to encourage children to have an active engagement with French: 

• Games – in order to develop vocabulary through repetition, reading, writing, speaking and listening skills. 
• Role-play – these should relate to the situations the children may find themselves in the future. 
• Action songs and rhymes – to develop phonetic skills, memory skills and to further vocabulary. 
• Reading and writing quality materials. 

• Animated videos that tell stories from which pupils can elicit the meaning and some of the vocabulary in French.   
• We build children’s confidence through praise for any contribution they make in the foreign language, however tentative. 
• We regularly revisit the vocabulary taught in the previous year / term to ensure that pupils are able to build on core structures and use their acquired language in different contexts.   

Impact 

As pupils develop their understanding of the four key skills needed to learn a foreign language (reading, writing, speaking and listening), they will become more confident to apply these in their own work with the necessary support to do so when needed.  As their confidence develops, we would hope that pupils will begin to speak in the language with more confidence; write increasingly more complex pieces of work using the core vocabulary taught; will understand more of the language that they hear without scaffolds or prompts and will begin to read to elicit the meaning of a text in French.  Pupils will develop an appreciation of the language spoken and will begin to use appropriate intonation and pronunciation as their confidence grows.  Their understanding of the language taught will be assessed using the materials provided with the units of work in the Rigalo scheme.