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Modern Foreign Languages

Learning is Remembering and Recalling...

 

Why do we teach MFL?

In Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis implores people across the globe to work together for the good of our planet.  At St. Augustine’s, we believe that the teaching of modern foreign languages plays a key role in helping our children to understand this concept of ‘our common home’.  As well as learning how to communicate in a new language, our children will develop their knowledge and understanding of other countries and cultures, and will have a greater appreciation of what it means to be a global citizen.

The curriculum

By the end of KS2, we aim to ensure that all pupils:

- 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.

How are MFL taught at St. Augustine’s?

Our pupils will be exposed to many different foreign languages throughout their time at St. Augustine’s due to the variety of places that we learn about in our cross-curricular topics.  However the main language that we teach is French.  This is to ensure that our children have a solid foundation in the subject before they move into Secondary education.  Up until the end of 2019, French was only taught in depth in Years 5 and 6.  However, from January 2020 French will be taught throughout KS2, to enable our pupils to make substantial progress in one language.  This will mean that initially the children who are currently in Years 3, 4 and 5 will be covering similar content, but teachers will deliver this in a method and at a depth suited to the age and experience of each class.

Classes will usually receive one dedicated French session per week (minimum 30 minutes) with regular shorter sessions throughout the week to allow for rehearsal and reinforcement of new vocabulary and grammar.