MFL
MFL at St Anne’s School
Subject Leader Mr P Booth
“With Christ in our hearts we live life to the full.”
INTENT
As a school of culture, curiosity and creativity, the intention of our MFL curriculum is to develop an interest in and thirst for learning other languages. Learning a language helps with problem solving skills, improves verbal abilities and can improve memory function. Our school has children from many different nations and we celebrate this diversity in learning another language.
We aim to introduce the learning of the French language and the understanding of its culture in enjoyable and stimulating ways. We aim to build the children’s ‘culture capital’ so that they are aware of similarities and differences between cultures. 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 in French with others and know how important other languages can be in their future. In short, we hope to lay the foundations for future language learning.
IMPLEMENTATION
Our MFL curriculum is designed to develop not only our children’s language skills, but also their love of learning a language. It progressively develops language skills, through weekly lessons in upper Key Stage 2 taught by a specialist language teacher. This allows the children to acquire new language then use and apply it in a range of different scenarios and topics. Children are encouraged and supported to develop their speaking and listening skills through conversational work, singing activities and games. As their confidence and skill grows, children record their work through pictures, captions and sentences. Children in Lower KS2, KS1 and EYFS are introduced to MFL through exploring other languages informally when studying another country and are encouraged to teach others simple phrase e.g. greetings in their own language.
At Saint Anne’s we also celebrate our diverse community by encouraging the children to teach words and phrases in their home language throughout the year and in our annual ‘International Day’.
In Year 6, we offer a residential to Paris. This gives the children the chance to apply what they have learned and deepens their cultural experience.
IMPACT
Our MFL curriculum will ensure all pupils develop key language learning skills set out by the national curriculum, as well as a love of languages and learning about other cultures.
These are as follows:
- Our children understand and respond to spoken and written language from a variety of authentic source
- Our childrenspeak 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
- Our childrencan write at varying length, for different purposes and audiences, using the variety of grammatical structures that they have learnt
- Our children discover and develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the language studied