Modern Foreign Languages (MFL)

Intent 

We believe that learning a modern foreign language is a vital part of children’s learning, which helps to prepare children for their secondary education.

Learning a language has an important role to play in the preparation of our children’s futures, as it helps to develop confidence and raise cultural understanding and deepens their curiosity about the world around them. We aim to build the children’s ‘cultural capital’ so that they have a knowledge and understanding of the richness and diversity between cultures.

At The Avenue, we provide our children with a high quality education in Modern Foreign Languages (MFL). All children in KS2 are provided with opportunities to explore French through the skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing, whilst meeting the requirements of the National Curriculum.

We use the Language Angels scheme of work and resources to ensure we offer a broad, vibrant and ambitious MFL curriculum that will inspire and excite our children. We use a wide variety of topics and themes that relate to other areas of the curriculum, whilst building on what children have previously learnt. All pupils at our school are expected to achieve their full potential by encouraging high expectations and excellent standards in their foreign language learning - the ultimate aim is that pupils will feel confident engaging in spoken French, develop skills in reading, listening and writing, and know how important languages will be in their future.

Our ultimate aim is to ensure that all Avenue pupils develop a genuine interest and positive curiosity about foreign languages, find them enjoyable and exciting and show a desire to continue their language learning past KS2. The intention is that they will be working towards becoming life-long language learners.

Implementation 

At The Avenue, children in KS2 progressively develop skills in French through well-planned lessons using the Language Angels Scheme of Work. Children acquire, use and apply a growing bank of vocabulary (through the use of topic Vocabulary Lists), language skills and grammatical knowledge organised around age-appropriate topics and themes. Cross-curricular topics allow French to become embedded in children’s learning. Our children learn through active participation in actions, rhymes, stories, song, grammar focus, video clips, sentence structure, dictionary work and may other creative ways to extend, embed and combine language skills.

As well as each subsequent lesson within a unit being progressive, the teaching organisation of Language Angels units also directs, drives and guarantees progressive learning and challenge. Units increase in level of challenge, stretch and linguistic and grammatical complexity as pupils move from Early Learning units through Intermediate units and into the most challenging Progressive units. Activities contain progressively more and lessons will have more content as the children become more confident and ambitious with the foreign language they are learning. Lessons offering appropriate levels of challenge are taught at all times to ensure children learn effectively, continuously building their knowledge of and enthusiasm for the language they are learning.

Pupils will continuously build on their previous knowledge as they progress in their French language learning journey through the primary phase. Previous language will be recycled, revised, recalled and consolidated whenever possible and appropriate.

Although our current MFL taught is French, we strive to provide children with opportunities to experience a range of other languages through naming our classes after different countries and celebrating the growing diversity of our pupils within our school.

Impact 

By the end of the French curriculum at The Avenue, our children will have developed key language learning skills, as set out by the National Curriculum, and a love of languages that will set them up for secondary school and beyond.

The impact of our MFL curriculum is measured in a number of ways. Our children will be able to discuss their learning and demonstrate their knowledge and understanding through a range of ‘Show what you Know’ activities. These may include pupil conferencing, looking at work in books, double page spreads, models, pictorial representations or images/videos of children’s practical learning. There are opportunities for teachers and pupils to assess pupils’ learning at the start and end of each unit to measure attainment and progress.

When our children leave us, they will have a better knowledge and understanding of the richness and diversity of their planet and the cultures that inhabit it, as well as a desire to learn more about the many languages that are spoken across the world.

Celebrating European Day of Languages 2024

Thursday 26th September 2024 marked European Day of Languages 2024. At The Avenue, we enjoyed celebrating a range of languages. We celebrated the day to raise awareness of the wide variety of languages spoken by the children and families at our school and we continue to strive to promote linguistic diversity whilst encouraging children of all ages to learn new languages.

Some children took on the challenge of designing posters, others sent in videos of words/phrases they'd learnt and some classes included language learning within their reading lessons. We heard some Polish, Hungarian, Nepalese, Welsh, French and some children showed us British Sign Language.