Intent
Learning a foreign language is a necessary part of being a member of a multi-cultural society and provides an opening to other cultures. A high-quality languages education should foster children’s curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world. It is our intent at Escomb Primary School to provide all of our children with a high-quality education in Modern Foreign Languages (MFL), which develops their love of learning about other languages and cultures.
Our current MFL taught is Spanish however, we strive to provide all children with opportunities to experience a range of other languages. It is our intention to ensure that by the end of our children’s primary education, they have acquired an understanding of both spoken and written Spanish, confidence to speak in Spanish with others and know how important
other languages can be in their future.
Implementation
Our MFL curriculum is designed to develop not only our children’s language skills, but also their love of learning a language. Children will gain some language experience across the whole school, but all children in KS2 will have regular language lessons with a language teaching expert.
We currently use ‘Lingotots’ to support our teaching of Spanish. It progressively develops language skills, through regularly taught lessons. This allows the children to acquire new language then use and apply it in a range of different scenarios and topics. Children are encouraged and supported to develop their speaking and listening skills through conversational work, singing activities and games. As their confidence and skill grows, children record their work through pictures, captions and sentences.
All teachers take the opportunity to use and revise the Spanish that the children have learned during other lessons and activities. e.g. register taking, counting, lining up/PE etc. Our language curriculum is also enhanced by the strong international links we have developed over a number of years. We have partner schools in Spain, Finland and Czech Republic and have been involved in an Erasmus+ projects which have enriched our language learning in school and provided first- hand experiences for children who have had the opportunity to travel and stay with families and also host visitors in their own homes. We are currently involved in Turing Programme and this will involve Years 5 & 6 children travelling to Yeles near Toledo in Spain.
We also take opportunities for our children to engage with language learning in different ways. For example, European Day of Languages, Japanese Language Taster sessions.
Impact
Our MFL curriculum will ensure all pupils develop key language learning skills set out by the national curriculum, as well as a love of languages and learning
about other cultures. These are as follows:
- understand and respond to spoken and written language from a variety of authentic sources
- speak with increasing confidence, fluency and spontaneity, finding ways of communicating what they want to say, including through discussion and asking questions, and continually improving the accuracy of their pronunciation and intonation
- can write at varying length, for different purposes and audiences, using the variety of grammatical structures that they have learnt – discover and develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the language studied
Assessment criteria has been developed, in line with national curriculum aims, to enable teachers to assess the progress of children in their language learning as they move through Key Stage 2, ensuring that children are supported and challenged as appropriate. Pupil Voice is also used to further develop the MFL curriculum, through questioning of pupils’ views and attitudes to learning a language.
