Languages

Intent

At Christ Church we believe that learning a foreign language will provide an opening to other cultures and will foster pupils’ curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world. Language teaching should provide the foundation for learning further languages, equipping children to study and work in other countries.

In French at Christ Church we aim to enable pupils to express their ideas and thoughts in another language and to understand and respond to its speakers - both in speech, reading and in writing. Pupils will 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.

Implementation

At Christ Church we have chosen to study French in MFL (due to our geographical locational and based upon the language chosen in our local secondary schools too). This starts in Year 3, once a week during 30 minute sessions.

We follow Rachel Hawkes' French scheme of work, which meets the National Curriculum objectives and builds progressively each academic year. Every year we start with a focus on phonics. The scheme is also designed to revisit the topics that have been taught in previous years, which further helps remember grammar and vocabulary. e.g. in Year 3 the numbers 1-12 are introduced and in Year 4 they are reviewed and numbers 13-31 are taught.

We teach our children French to generate a fascination for words and how language works, a wider curiosity about the peoples and cultures of French speaking countries and the foundational knowledge to support confident and practical communication in French. Essential Knowledge We teach three core strands of essential knowledge:

Phonics – the key components of the sound-writing relationship
Vocabulary – a set of the most frequently used words
Grammar – the essential building blocks required to create simple sentences independently (including gender of nouns, singular and plural forms, adjectives (place and agreement), and the conjugation of key verbs)

This knowledge can then be applied within different strands of their learning:

Language comprehension (listening and reading)
Language production (speaking and writing)