Greengate Lane Academy Astrea Academy Trust
“Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things.” – Flora Lewis
Purpose of Education for Modern Foreign Languages:
Learning another language offers pupils the opportunity to explore relationships between language and identity and develop a deeper understanding of other cultures and the world around them. Our aim is for a languages education to promote pupils’ curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world.
Curriculum
The Curriculum for MFL at Greengate Lane is ‘French’. Learning French provides opportunities for pupils to communicate for practical purposes and learn new ways of thinking. Our goals at Greengate Lane are:
- To introduce young children to another language in a way that is enjoyable and fun.
- Enable children to use their knowledge of the language with confidence to understand, speak, read and write.
- Help develop awareness of another country and culture
- Express simple ideas with clarity using sentences and appropriate punctuation and grammar.
- Foster an interest in learning other languages.
Teaching inclusiveness through a new language assist in pupils living and working alongside each other in harmony.
Our belief is that the Greengate Lane school values are weaved throughout our curriculum to support our pupils and our school community, our RE lessons are structured as follows:
- SCHOLARSHIP: our MFL curriculum allows our children to be scholarly, they are taught the subject in depth, progressively building on prior knowledge, resulting in children remembering more and being able to articulate what that have learnt.
- CURIOUSITY: pupils learn that they and other people are different and therefore have different strengths and talents, they are encouraged to ask questions and be curious. They would know different languages as well as knowledge or experiences which are infinitely valuable to share with their peers.
- TENACITY: pupils learn about how to continually improve on their linguistic knowledge by practicing and continuing learning throughout their years at school.
- ASPIRATIONAL: pupils are given the opportunity to orally rehearse sentences and sayings from a new country. These in turn provide new knowledge from countries which children may not have been aware of.
- KINDNESS: lessons are structured so that children learn skills together, they learn about diversity and are taught to be tolerant and kind to those with different beliefs and cultures to themselves.
Our curriculum drivers (vocabulary acquisition, SMSC, cultural awareness) are at the heart of all our MFL lessons.
Implementation
At Greengate Lane Academy, we teach MFL through the Primary Languages Network (PLN). The scheme provides teachers with week-by-week lessons for each year group in the school, (MFL is only taught in KS2). It is ideal for specialist and non-specialist teachers and provides lesson plans, assessment and clear progression. The Scheme supports all the requirements of the National Curriculum.
In Key Stage 2 children will focus on:
- Interactive speaking and listening tasks within a lesson.
- Reading and writing activities will be offered in all units.
- Grammar concepts which will increase in complexity as pupils progress through each stage of the curriculum.
- Writing activities for pupils to recall previously learnt languages.
- Learning interesting facts about France.
These are taught within KS2, their lessons are delivered by class teachers to their own classes each week in order to teach the required knowledge and skills in a developmental and age-appropriate way.
Measuring the Impact of the French Curriculum
The Curriculum is the progression model and pupils will continuously build on their previous knowledge as they progress in their language learning journey through the primary phase. Previous language learning will be revised, recalled and consolidated as pupils’ progress.
We measure impact through:
- Lesson observations – how well children are contributing to discussions and how they are using their growing vocabulary and pronunciation.
- Learning walks – how well the curriculum intent is embedded through the lied experience of the pupils.
- Pupil voice –to listen to pupils’ views about their learning and how well curriculum content is taught and understood.
- Quizzes (puzzles) and end of unit assessments, including spoken activities help teachers and leaders understand that the curriculum is being learned and remembered.
The PLN tracking & progression tool supports teachers to reflect on gaps and adapt teaching in the next lessons.
Leaders use all of these impact measures to evaluate the impact of the curriculum and where needed adapt and improve it.