Intent

Our intent for French at Idle C.E is to instil a love of language learning and an awareness of other cultures.  At Idle, we foster children’s curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world: all children should find joy in discovering another language and in sharing this with others. Pupils at Idle CE develop the confidence to communicate in French for practical purposes, using both written and spoken French. It is intended that when pupils leave Idle C of E Primary, they will have the natural curiosity, courage and resilience needed to use the languages skills acquired during their time here and providing the foundation for learning further languages, equipping children to study and work in other countries.

Implementation 

At Idle C.E Primary School, pupils have weekly lessons in French throughout Key Stage 2. Teachers use the resources and units of work from Kapow to deliver high quality lessons that fit within the national curriculum and encourage children’s love for learning.  In Lower KS2, children acquire basic skills and understanding of French, with a strong emphasis placed on developing their speaking and listening skills. These are then embedded and further developed in Upper KS2, alongside reading and writing, gradually progressing onto more complex language concepts and greater learner autonomy. Our lessons are designed so that areas of phonics, vocabulary and grammar are built cumulatively through both language comprehension (listening and reading) and language production (speaking and writing). We achieve this by:

• Providing opportunities to communicate for practical purposes around familiar subjects and routines.
• Providing balanced opportunities for communication in both spoken and written French.
• Ensuring key skills and vocabulary is revisited repeatedly with increasing complexity, allowing pupils to revise and build on their previous learning.
• Emphasising Kapow’s ‘Mouth Mechanics’ to support pupils with phoneme pronunciation in French.
• Providing cross-curricular links, allowing pupils to make connections and apply their language skills to other areas of their learning.
• Ensuring lessons incorporate a range of teaching strategies from independent tasks to paired and group work, which include roleplay, language
• games and language detective work.
  

Impact 

The impact of teaching in French at Idle CE Primary School will be monitored continuously through both formative and summative assessment. The expected impact is that pupils 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 and 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.
  

The impact of our curriculum will be measured through the following methods:

• Key questioning skills built into lessons based on key learning objectives.
• Lesson recording in ‘Big Books,’ which are scrutinised termly to ensure skills progression.
• Observing children speaking and listening in another language.
• Marking of written work.
• Images and videos of children completing speaking and listening activities.
• Interviewing the pupils about their learning (pupil voice).
• Learning walks.
• Subject tracking through assessment grids.