Five Elms Primary School

Intent

At Five Elms Primary School we are committed to promoting French within our school by broadening pupils’ understanding of the world and developing strong, life-long linguistic skills. Along with learning new topics, reinforcing knowledge in every lesson is key to learning a language. We want to focus on giving pupils plenty of opportunities to practice the language and hence communicate in a foreign language embedding key new vocabulary in every lesson. This is the first step towards becoming independent as a language learner.
Learning another language is full of rich opportunities to develop pupils’ spiritual, moral and cultural experiences. Videos, songs, rhymes all enrich pupils’ experience with cultural insights into other people’s lives. Pupils have the chance to understand and may try out aspects of another culture in their classroom, such as food, clothes or celebrations, building a positive appreciation of key features of personal and national identity, values and beliefs.

Implementation 

Through French learning, our children become better linguists who will remember more, know more and understand more.
Pupils are given regular opportunities to listen to, join in with, read, speak and write French. From the earliest stages in Y3, pupils engage in a lot of learning to train the ear, to tune into and learn how to produce the sounds of the language, through the explicit teaching and learning of phonics and phonics-related activities. Then pupils begin to develop the ability to form simple sentences of their own, in relation to topics of close, personal interest, such as self and family. As learning develops, pupils are given opportunities to engage with French culture, learning about places, festivals and other aspects of daily life in countries where the language is spoken. They develop confidence in writing from memory. Building up over the course of KS2 to being able to write a short paragraph with information on two-three topics.

Teachers make use of a wide variety of resources, including ICT, and learning activities, including games, information-finding (research), pattern-finding, and quizzes to stimulate interest and general literacy and other learning skills. There are clear links with literacy, particularly through the teaching of grammar, and teachers work together to join up these aspects of pupil language development.

Impact

The children are taught to know and understand how to:

• Ask and answer questions;
• Use correct pronunciation and intonation;
• Acquire new words;
• Interpret meaning;
• Understand basic grammar;
• Use dictionaries;
• Work in pairs and groups, and communicate in French;
• Look at life in another culture.

MFL (French) is taught weekly through whole class teaching. During French sessions, children are given the opportunity to work as a class, as individuals and as part of a group. The choice of class organisation is determined by the learning task. By its nature, MFL will involve lots of interaction with visual, auditory and kinaesthetic prompts.