At Parkhead Community Primary School, we want our pupils to enjoy, engage and interact when learning French. We believe that classroom talk and questioning is key to meaningful and effective learning within French. In order to support the needs of our pupils, the curriculum has vocabulary and reading at its core. As children progress through school, children’s vocabulary is improved through consistent exposure to subject specific vocabulary, which is explicitly taught, displayed in classrooms and revisited. 

Intent

We aim 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 skills 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 therefore broadening and raising aspirations. 

Implementation

At Parkhead, we deliver weekly French lessons that focus on the following areas: Speaking and pronunciation, listening, reading and writing, grammar, intercultural understanding and language detective skills. Through regular lessons, we give the children the opportunity to deepen their understanding of French. Pupils are given opportunities to communicate for practical purposes around familiar subjects and routines. In lower key stage 2, the focus is on developing oral skills before incorporating written French beyond Year 4. Key skills and vocabulary are revisited repeatedly with increasing complexity, allowing children to revise and build on their previous learning. Cross-curricular links 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. ‘Language detective skills’ help children develop an understanding of French grammar, rather than committing to memory vast amounts of French vocabulary.

Impact

Through regular teaching of French at Parkhead, we expect that, by the end of Key Stage 2, children will:

• Be able to engage in purposeful dialogue in a practical situation and to express an opinion. For example, to order food and drinks in a café or to follow directions.
• 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 learning.
• Be able to identify word classes in a sentence and apply grammatical rules they have learnt.
• Be able to construct short texts on familiar topics.
• Meet the end of Key Stage 2 expectations outlined in the National Curriculum for Languages.