Our Vision

Learning a foreign language is a liberation from insularity and provides an opening to other cultures. A high-quality languages education should foster pupils’ curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world. (National Curriculum)

At The Spinney Primary School, we value the many languages spoken in our school community. We have a strong focus on effective communication throughout our curriculum, which extends to our MFL curriculum.

Our approach to teaching French is underpinned by an understanding that learning one language opens the doors to learning others. By learning languages, we encourage children to broaden their horizons and appreciate the fact that they are global citizens. The teaching should enable pupils to express their ideas and thoughts in another language and to understand and respond to its speakers, both in speech and in writing. It should also provide opportunities for them to communicate for practical purposes, learn new ways of thinking and read great literature in the original language.

We seek to empower our children for their future where living, working or travelling abroad may require the confidence and skill to communicate in another language.

Our goals are that pupils will learn 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.

How we plan for and teach French at The Spinney Primary School

MFL in our school is taught in accordance with the National Curriculum for Modern Foreign Languages.

Pupils begin learning French in Key Stage One, with early exposure to the language through songs and rhymes. They become familiar with the sounds of the language and some basic words and phrases.

Pupils in Key State Two enjoy a weekly French lesson lasting 45 minutes. Our teachers are supported by the Tout Le Monde scheme of work and other high-quality resources to plan and teach engaging lessons.

In French lessons, our children practice four key skills: speaking, listening, reading and writing. They also make meaningful links to grammar and the similarities and differences between English and French sentence structures.

French lessons are very popular at The Spinney – our children hugely enjoy learning memorable songs and rhymes. By the end of Key Stage Two, our children relish the chance to have conversations in another language, based on their learning in class.

For more information about the French we teach in each year group, please see the class pages.