Modern Foreign Languages Curriculum Intent
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. [1]
"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart."
Nelson Mandela
Our curriculum aims to enable students to communicate in another language. We empower our students to understand and respond through knowing and doing in French and Spanish with expressing ideas and thoughts relevant to their needs. Our aim is to broaden students’ horizons and encourage them to step beyond familiar cultural boundaries through stepping out of their comfort zone and develop new ways of seeing the world through our Colmers mantra of Opening Minds and Opening Doors. We are also in the process of planning visits to Boulogne in France and Valencia in Spain which are due to take place next March.
Our teaching will enable students 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 develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the language studied.
Students will develop a competency that is both broad and deep in the skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing based on a sound foundation of core grammar, vocabulary and phonics through key vocabulary and Phonics spotlights each lesson. They should also be able to know how to understand and communicate personal and information that goes beyond their immediate needs and interests, developing and justifying points of view in speech and writing, with increased spontaneity, independence, and accuracy. Critical learning, high frequency language through KEY VOCABULARY and key communicative functions are revisited receptively and productively many times as we progress through the curriculum. For example, when learning how to describe activities done on a past holiday in French, we need to revisit previous teaching on how to conjugate the verbs ‘avoir’ and ‘être’ in all forms. In Spanish, when talking about food and drink and using the idiom ‘tener hambre/sed’, we need to revisit the present tense of the irregular verb ‘tener’. Our goal with our students is to develop their ability to be self-efficacious and to create the optimal conditions for learner success thus encompassing Know more, Do more, Be more.
We aim to develop their respect for others both in our communities and around the world and we want to build up their cultural capital and widen their horizons through a range of class activities, cultural events and trips. Through the future trips we organise, we provide our students with the opportunity to communicate for practical purposes.
We aim to ensure that:
· our students know more and respond to language from a variety of authentic sources.
· they speak with increasing self-esteem and spontaneity.
· they use the variety of grammatical structures they have learnt when communicating.
Know More. Do More. Be More.
Over the course of their study our students are given the skills and knowledge to become confident and independent speakers through phonics, vocabulary, and grammar. Learning is organised in a spiral approach and progression is built in the curriculum. Over the course of their learning, students regularly revisit the language they learn and continually practise the skills that allow them to become good communicators. From Year 7, we teach students the specific skills they will need later in their study for GCSE and A Level through an introductory grammar course. We adapt our teaching to cater for the needs, abilities, and interests of each individual student. Communicative functions and grammar are taught conjointly although the outcome is assessed in terms of communicative function.
Through a broad range of activities, students are taught to:
· Know and identify and use tenses and other structures which convey the present, past and future.
· Know and manipulate key grammatical structures and patterns.
· Know and develop a wide vocabulary allowing them to give and justify their opinions and take part in discussion about wider issues than their immediate needs and interests.
· Know and use accurate grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Students also learn to:
· Listen and respond to a variety of spoken language through doing practice exercises.
· Transcribe words and sentences that they hear in line with the new GCSE specification (current y7)
· Read original and adapted materials and understand their purpose.
· Read literary texts which expand their understanding of the language and culture in Thinking Reading 800-word texts.
· Write creatively and translate written texts accurately from and into the target language with the help of sentence builders that help scaffold the knowledge.
