Languages

Modern Foreign Languages @ Ashwell Primary School

Purpose of study

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. 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. Language teaching should provide the foundation for learning further languages, equipping pupils to study and work in other countries.

Aims

The national curriculum for languages aims 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.

At Ashwell School we use the Language Angels Scheme of work to teach children French.

The scheme of work helps us to approach the teaching and learning of foreign languages like ‘language lego’. Start with small blocks of language knowledge, increase the number and complexity and encourage pupils to put the blocks together to create complex, adventurous and amazing linguistic structures. The unit planners cover medium and long-term planning and detail which units are taught to each year group for each half-term of the school year to ensure each pupil is challenged and stretched, all the requirements of DfE Languages Programme of Study for KS2 are met and substantial learning and progression is achieved.

Curriculum Enrichment

On an annual basis, we hold an international day in the summer term to celebrate cultural diversity.

Languages Downloadable Documents

The following documents are to help parents understand what we teach, when we teach it and why we teach it:

To view the National Curriculum Programme of Study for KS1 and KS2 please see here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/239042/PRIMARY_national_curriculum_-_Languages.pdf