Modern Foreign Languages (French) at Harlyn

Intent

At Harlyn Primary School, our intentions for Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) is to provide our children with an enjoyable, high-quality education which develops their love of learning, fascination and enthusiasm for other cultures and communities.  

Our current MFL taught is French, which has become an integrated part of a rich and coherent curriculum. Lessons enable our children to make substantial progress in French, whilst gaining transferable language skills that will assist and lay foundations for further language learning.  

By the end of our children’s primary education, we aim to ensure that they have acquired an understanding of both spoken and written French and are able to express themselves and their ideas using a foreign language.

Implementation

Our school follows the Primary Languages Network scheme of work (Click2Teach/Video2Teach) to teach French to our KS2 children. It is a live scheme which is continually updated and revised in order to meet with current curriculum standards. It holds at its core the Intent, Implementation and Impact of MFL whilst maintaining a ‘primary’ focus.

To promote an active learning of languages a range of teaching methods are implemented to ensure that the children are developing their linguistic skills through listening, speaking, reading and writing.

Our lessons are designed to motivate the children and have clear, achievable objectives. We incorporate a range of creative activities to extend, embed and combine our children’s language skills. Each lesson, children build on previous skills and develop new ones through a range of fun, exciting and engaging activities:

• learning new vocabulary through rhyme, stories and song
• exploring the French language through drama, instructions and conversations
• reinforcing memory with actions
• video clips
• air writing and written tasks of words, phrases and sentences
• use of bilingual dictionaries and stories
• playing games using interactive sources or physical movement
• teaching of basic French grammar, sentence structure and spelling patterns

Impact

Our MFL curriculum is planned to demonstrate progression both in core skills and language learning skills set out by the national curriculum, as well as a love of languages and awareness of other cultures.

Language learning skills:

• respond to spoken and written language from a variety of authentic sources
• speak with increasing confidence, fluency and spontaneity
• communicating what they want to say through discussion and use of questions
• continually improving the accuracy of their pronunciation and intonation
• writing at varying length, for different purposes and audiences, using a variety of grammatical structures
• discover and develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the French language

Assessment for learning takes place during lessons in order to evaluate and provide immediate feedback to improve the children’s knowledge and understanding. Errors are corrected by being ‘re-framed’ and growth mindset is encouragement for all to ‘have a go’ and learn from any mistakes.

We expect the impact of our teaching to be that children meet age related expectations. These can be seen in the progression document below.