The principles of our Sandlings ethos “Sandlings is a unique, nurturing school where everyone belongs and thrives” can be seen throughout our MFL curriculum and provision but in particular in developing a sense of belonging through the study of French language and culture, celebrating uniqueness and similarities.
Learning a foreign language provides an opening to other cultures, fostering pupils’ curiosity and deepening their understanding of the world.
The characteristics we aim to foster in our children are:
- The confidence to speak with good intonation and pronunciation.
- Fluency in reading.
- Fluency and imagination in writing.
- A strong awareness of the culture of the countries where the language is spoken.
- A passion for languages and a commitment to the subject.
- The ability to use language creatively and spontaneously.
- An independence in their studies and the ability to draw upon a wide range of resources.
The 4 thresholds concepts for Modern Foreign Languages are:
- Read fluently
- Write imaginatively
- Speak confidently
- Understand the culture of the countries in which the language is spoken
The Subject Topics
There are a range of topics taught which include:
Food and Drink, Birthdays, Celebrations, School subjects, Holidays, Animals and Pets, Sports, how to tell the time, Body parts and Clothing.
Implementation
We use the Chris Quigley Essentials Curriculum scheme to plan our French curriculum to ensure progressions over a two-year cycle and we supplement this with will a chosen and considered scheme – Rigilo Our curriculum design is based on evidence from cognitive science; three main principles underpin it:
- Learning is most effective with spaced repetition.
- Interleaving helps pupils to discriminate between topics and aids long-term retention.
- Retrieval of previously learned content is frequent and regular, which increases both storage and retrieval strength.
In addition to the three principles, we also understand that learning is invisible in the short term and that sustained mastery takes time. Our content is subject specific. We make intra-curricular links to strengthen schema.
A variety of teaching and learning styles are used to adapt and support learning when teaching French i.e.
- Setting common tasks that are open-ended which can have a variety of results as an ‘end task’ that the children
- work towards;
- Setting tasks of increasing difficulty using the Rigolo materials for extra support.
- Providing opportunities for pupils to work on their own and to collaborate with others in written tasks
- Listen and repeat activities to learn new vocabulary and phrases.
- Paired work to practise spoken language with conversational structure.
- We use Oracy as the golden thread for children to talk using French vocabulary