Intent
At Holy Trinity CE Primary Academy and Nursery, we aim to provide a high-quality languages education that fosters pupils’ curiosity and deepens their understanding of their world. Foreign language lessons will provide pupils with openings to other cultures; opportunities to appreciate and compare other cultures will support our children in viewing themselves as global citizens who celebrate and value diversity. We aim to provide our children with many opportunities to communicate for practical purposes; we want our children be able to communicate and collaborate effectively across the world. Our languages education aims to foster enjoyment, confidence and interest with the aim to motivate our children to continue to thrive as passionate linguists beyond primary education.
Implementation
At Holy Trinity we follow the approach, planning and materials provided in the Primary Language network curriculum. This scheme provides a research based immersion approach that is still considered a model of best practice in MfL. The Primary Language Network Scheme of work supports our teachers who are non-specialists to provide high quality sequences of learning which progressively build pupils skills in speaking , listening and writing. Video resources using native speakers offer a high quality model for pupils and teachers.
Principles of excellent languages teaching at Holy Trinity Church of England Primary Academy:
- Children will think carefully about the phonics of the language being studied.
- Children will focus on how to pronounce sounds.
- Children will explore and experiment with sound patterns and make links and comparisons between languages, including languages used in the school community.
- Children will think carefully about how the sounds are represented in writing.
- Our lessons will follow a ‘small step’ approach – simple grammatical concepts will steadily increase in complexity. Children will manipulate simple language step by step.
- When learning new words, children will focus on a wide range of commonly used words, which include verbs as well as lists of nouns linked to a topic.
- Children will learn about the culture of the language that they are learning.
- Children will focus on the building blocks of a language (phonics, grammar and vocabulary).
- We recognise that language learning is greatly enhanced where it is linked to or embedded in the wider curriculum so that children and young people can enjoy exploring and using language in meaningful contexts and can relate their language learning to other work across the curriculum.
- All of our units of work will focus on developing speaking, listening and writing.
Impact
Our languages network is high quality, well thought out and is planned to demonstrate progression. If children are keeping up with the curriculum, they are deemed to be making good or better progress. In addition, we measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:
• A reflection on standards achieved against the planned outcomes;
• A celebration of learning for each term which demonstrates progression across the school;
• Pupil discussions about their learning; which includes a discussion of their thoughts, ideas, processing and evaluations of work.
French 2022-2023 Long term Overview
