Modern Foreign Languages - French
One of our school ‘drivers’ is for us all to be good ‘global citizens’, and an important aspect of that is generating enthusiasm about the world and its people. Learning another language is part of that – because it enables children to communicate with others – and it shows a desire to connect with others from different cultures and backgrounds.
The global citizenship element is taught and promoted from Reception onwards, and children at Clinton learn French from Year 3, for an hour a week.
At Clinton, we follow the Kapow Primary French scheme of work to deliver high-quality, interactive French lessons. This scheme meets the principles we set out for French teaching at Clinton. It is designed with six integral strands that run throughout:
- Speaking and pronunciation
- Listening
- Reading and writing
- Grammar
- Intercultural understanding
- Language detective skills
Through our French curriculum, pupils are given opportunities to communicate for practical purposes around familiar subjects and routines. Lessons provide balanced opportunities for communication in both spoken and written French, although in Year 3 the focus is on developing oral skills, before incorporating written French in Year 4 and beyond.
The Kapow Primary scheme is a spiral curriculum, with key skills and vocabulary revisited repeatedly with increasing complexity, allowing pupils to revise and build on their previous learning. Cross-curricular links are included throughout the French units, allowing children to make connections and apply their language skills to other areas of their learning.
At Clinton, lessons are based on our transferable skills and incorporate a range of teaching strategies from independent tasks, paired and group work including role-play, language games and language detective work. Our curriculum focuses on developing what we term ‘language detective skills’ and developing an understanding of French grammar, rather than on committing to memory vast amounts of French vocabulary.
We have routinely taken children to France in Year 6, and the children are encouraged to put their language to use! We try to give them a purpose for learning the language, so that they know they are building up to an event! Our French curriculum prepares children to leave Clinton equipped with a range of language-learning skills to enable them to study French, or any other language, with confidence at Key Stage 3. We aim for all children to be able to:
- Engage in purposeful dialogue in practical situations (e.g., ordering in a cafe, following directions) and express an opinion.
- Make increasingly accurate attempts to read unfamiliar words, phrases, and short texts.
- Speak and read aloud with confidence and accuracy in pronunciation.
- Demonstrate understanding of spoken language by listening and responding appropriately.
- Use a bilingual dictionary to support their language learning.
- Be able to identify word classes in a sentence and apply grammatical rules they have learnt.
- Have developed an awareness of cognates and near-cognates and be able to use them to tackle unfamiliar words in French, English, and other languages.
- Be able to construct short texts on familiar topics.
- Meet the end of Key Stage 2 stage expectations outlined in the national curriculum for Languages