Intent

Holbeton Primary School's french curriculum aims to instil a love of language learning and an awareness of other cultures. We want pupils to develop the confidence to communicate in French for practical purposes, using both written and spoken French. Through our scheme of work, we aim to give pupils a foundation for language learning that encourages and enables them to apply their sills to learning further languages, developing a strong understanding of the English language, facilitating future study and opening opportunities to study and work in other countries in the future.

Implementation

Our French curriculum is designed with six strands that run throughout.

These are:

• Speaking and pronunciation
• Listening
• Reading and writing
• Grammar
• Intercultural understanding
• Language detective skills.

Through our curriculum, children are given opportunities to communicate for practical purposes around familiar subjects and routines. The curriculum provides balanced opportunists for communication in both spoken and written French, although in Year 3 the focus is on developing oral skills, before incorporating written French in Year 4 and beyond.

Our curriculum is a spiral curriculum, with key skills and vocabulary revisited repeatedly with increasing complexity, allowing pupils to revise and build on their previous learning. Cross-curricular lines are included throughout our French units, allowing children to make connections and apply their language skills to other areas of their learning.

Lessons incorporate a range of teaching strategies from independent tasks, paired and group work including role-play, language games and language detective work. Our curriculum focuses on developing what we term 'language detective skills' and developing an understanding of French grammar, rather than on committing to memory vast amounts of French vocabulary. Differentiation is present in every lessons to ensure that lessons can be accessed and enjoyed by all.  In order to help pupils retain their French learning, we incorporate French into the classroom environment every day.

Impact

The impact of our curriculum is monitored continuously through both formative and summative assessment. Pupils leave the school equipped with a range of language-earning skills to enable them to study French, or any other language, with confidence at Key Stage 3.

The impact of our curriculum is that children will:

• Be able to engage in purposeful dialogue in practical situations (e.g., ordering in a cafe, following directions) and express an opinion.
• Make increasingly accurate attempts to read unfamiliar words, phrases and short texts.
• Speak and read aloud with confidence and accuracy in pronunciation.
• Demonstrate understanding of spoken language by listening nard responding appropriately.
• Use a bilingual dictionary to support their language learning.
• Be able to identify word classes in a sentence and apply grammatical rules they have learnt.
• Have developed an awareness of cognates and near-cognates and be able to use them to tackle unfamiliar words in French, English and other languages.
• Be able to construct short texts on familiar topics.
• Meet the end of Key Stage 2 stage expectations outlined in the National Curriculum for Languages.