Our MFL Vision Statement
Intent: At Christ Church Junior School, we provide a relevant, broad, vibrant, and ambitious foreign languages curriculum that inspires and excites our pupils using a wide variety of topics and themes. The five key language learning skills; listening, speaking, reading, writing and grammar are taught in an age-appropriate way across the primary phase. This enables pupils to use and apply their learning in a variety of contexts, laying down solid foundations for future language learning and helping the children improve overall attainment in other subject areas. In addition, the children are taught how to look up and research language they are unsure of and they have a bank of reference materials to help them with their spoken and written tasks.
The intent is that all pupils develop a genuine interest and positive curiosity about foreign languages, finding them enjoyable and stimulating. Learning a second language offers pupils the opportunity to explore relationships between language and identity, develop a deeper understanding of other cultures and the world around them with a better awareness of self, others, and cultural differences.
Our Curriculum
Implementation: All classes have access to a very high-quality foreign languages curriculum using the Language Angels scheme of work and resources. This progressively develops pupil skills in foreign languages through regularly taught and well-planned weekly or bi-weekly lessons in KS2 which are taught by class teachers and/or a language specialist teacher.
Children progressively acquire, use, and apply a growing bank of vocabulary, language skills and grammatical knowledge organised around age-appropriate topics and themes – building blocks of language into a more complex, fluent, and authentic language. Units, where possible and appropriate, are linked to class topics and cross curricular themes. Children build on previous knowledge gradually as their foreign language lessons continue to recycle, revise, and consolidate previously learnt language, whilst building on all five language skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing and grammar.
Units are progressive within themselves as subsequent lessons within a unit build on the language and knowledge taught in previous lessons. As pupils progress through the lessons in a unit, they build their knowledge and develop the complexity of the language they use. We think of the progression within the 6 lessons in a unit as ‘Language Lego’. We provide blocks of language knowledge and, over the course of a 6-week unit, encourage pupils to build more complex and sophisticated language structures with their blocks of language knowledge.
Progress of skills
Impact: Units increase in level of challenge, stretch and linguistic and grammatical complexity as pupils move from Early Learning units through Intermediate units and into the most challenging Progressive units. Units in each subsequent level of the teaching type categories require more knowledge and application of skills than the previous teaching type. Activities contain progressively more text (both in English and French) and lessons have more content as the children become more confident and ambitious with the foreign language they are learning.
Early Learning units start at basic noun and article level and teach pupils how to formulate short phrases. By the time pupils reach Progressive Units they are exposed to much longer text and are encouraged to formulate their own, more personalised responses based on a much wider bank of vocabulary, linguistic structures, and grammatical knowledge. They are able to create longer pieces of spoken and written language and are encouraged to use a variety of conjunctions, adverbs, adjectives, opinions, and justifications.
Pupils continuously build on their previous knowledge as they progress in their foreign language learning journey through the primary phase. Previous language is recycled, revised, recalled, and consolidated whenever possible and appropriate.