Intent

Good modern foreign language teaching aims to teach pupils to:  

• 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   

  At Hagbourne, we teach French to Key Stage 2. The main objective for each lesson is that all children enjoy learning MFL and feel that they leave Key Stage 2 with a foundation upon which to build in the coming years of their language journey.  

 We recognise and celebrate that our community is diverse and understand that language-learning is essential for children to begin to understand the world around them; French lessons aim to illustrate the cultural similarities and differences between France and the UK.  

 During lessons, children will be exposed to French in a variety of ways; we use authentic spoken materials as much as possible to allow the children to build up their ‘ear’ for French. They are taught about what life in France is like for children and how this differs from or is similar to life here in the UK. They are also taught that French is spoken in other countries beyond France.   

Teaching of French closely follows the most up-to-date pedagogy and methodology that the school has access to; Gianfranco Conti’s methodology of sentence-builder based learning.  

Implementation   

We achieve this by:  

• Setting common learning opportunities which are open-ended and can have a variety of responses; these enable less able learners to access the same learning as more able peers and do not put ‘glass-ceilings’ on the most able linguists 

• Setting tasks of increasing difficulty, some children not completing all tasks 

• Playing a variety of engaging language games to whet the appetite for further learning 

• Providing resources of different complexity according to the ability of the child  

• Providing different levels of support to enable less able children to access the curriculum in line with their peers e.g. through effective use of TA support within the classroom 

• Frequent revision of basic structures and phrases to ensure ‘deep learning’ of key information 

• Encouraging an ‘active lesson’ with as many planned movement opportunities as possible     

Impact  

Assessment  

It is expected that work will be assessed in keeping with the school’s assessment policy. We assess the children’s work in French by making informal judgements as we observe the children during lessons.   

 Teachers assess children’s work in French by making assessments as they observe them working during lessons. This allows the teacher to make assessments of attainment and progress for each child. The teacher will decide if a child is working towards, at or above their age.   

Often, most of a French lesson is oral/aural based learning, immediate oral feedback is provided by the teacher during the lesson and all children are encouraged to engage as often as possible every lesson.  

Where work is recorded, it will be marked according to the school marking policy. Where appropriate, children should be provided with feedback which allows them to focus on the next steps in their learning. After receiving feedback in their books, children should have the opportunity to respond to it and ‘polish/re-draft’ their work if appropriate at the beginning of the next lesson.  

 Where appropriate teachers may choose to use more formal or summative assessment methods for assessing progression.