French

Intent

At Wilshere-Dacre, we aim to provide all of our children with a high-quality education in Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) which develops their love of learning about other languages and culture.  Our current MFL taught is French, however we encourage classes to discuss other languages, especially those that are spoken at home by some of the pupils.  It is our intention to ensure that by the end of our children’s primary education, they have acquired an understanding of both spoken and written French, confidence to speak French with others and know how important other languages can be in their future.

Implementation

French is taught as our Modern Foreign Language in KS2. It is taught in a whole-class setting, every other week. The lessons are designed to motivate children from the first moment and have clear, achievable objectives and incorporate creative activities for different learning styles. French lessons provide a variety of sources to model the language, use games, stories and songs to maximise enjoyment and make as many connections to real life situations as possible. We focus on speaking and listening in Year 3- gradually developing skills in reading and writing in order to lay the foundations for foreign language teaching in KS3. Examples of topics covered are:

• Year 3 – Greetings, numbers, colours, body parts
• Year 4 - Talking about ourselves, hobbies, animals and pets, food and ordering in cafes
• Year 5 – Talking about our families, months, days of the week, seasons, clothes and shops
• Year 6 – Introduction to ‘er’ verbs, extending sentences, telling the time, school life and daily routine

Each lesson, children build on the skills that they have already learnt and develop new ones through a range of fun and engaging activities:

• learning French vocabulary
• asking and answering questions, and following instructions in French
• reinforcing memory with mime and physical actions
• playing games and learning songs
• video clips
• using bilingual dictionaries
• teaching of basic French grammar, sentence structure and spelling patterns
• learning French phonics
• extending into fuller phrases and sentences
• creative tasks to demonstrate learning.

All children have a French folder in which to collect any work they have completed and also a French jotter, which they can use to note down any new vocabulary/ insights in a way that works for them as an individual.  They keep these for the duration of their time at Wilshere-Dacre so that by Year 6, they have a comprehensive collection of notes on the various topics, to take with them into secondary school.

Impact

We expect to see our children:

• 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
• write at varying length, for different purposes and audiences, using the variety of grammatical structures that they have learnt
• discover an appreciation for another language and culture
• enjoy the challenge of building up a broad range of vocabulary and understanding of the French language
• develop the basic skills of French in order to hold a short conversation if they ever visit France or meet anyone French
• use the skills learned at Wilshere-Dacre to build further skills in French in secondary school with the option of extending to learning another language such as Spanish or Italian