Modern Foreign Language
At St Philip’s, the languages curriculum aims to foster pupils’ curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world, providing a solid foundation for learning further languages in the future.
We are committed to teaching in a creative and academically rigorous way, using a range of materials and medias to enhance learning for the pupils.
Our Language provision recognises that learning a foreign language not only enhances general communication language skills across the curriculum, but also offers an opening to other cultures. We aim to foster pupils’ curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world, providing a solid foundation for learning further languages in the future.
Learning a foreign language makes you think about cultural differences, and celebrate the fact that other people are different. Not only does learning a language improve your linguistic skills, it also can support wider learning such as Spelling, punctuation and Grammar, give great cross-curricular links and enhance the development of listening skills, reading skills, decoding and memory skills.
Here at St Philip’s, we focus on the language of French. It is taught across Key Stage 2 on a weekly basis and we use the iLanguages Scheme of Work to support and resource these lessons.
As a school we have links with other schools in France and Spain. We have a strong pen-pal link to a school in both France and Spain. The school has the ‘International School’ status. We also have ‘Fair Trade’ status. We have held Fair Trade status as a school since 2013.
Our curriculum intent for Languages
Our INTENT for the Languages curriculum is for all children at St Philip’s Catholic Primary to be able to communicate ideas, facts and feelings in speech and writing in another language. During their time at our school, all children will develop their confidence in listening, speaking, reading and writing skills so that they can:
- understand and respond to spoken and written language from a variety of authentic sources
- speak 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
- write at varying length, for different purposes and audiences, using the variety of grammatical structures that they have learnt
- discover and develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the language studied.
How we will implement our intentions
St Philip’s Catholic Primary follows a Languages scheme of work offered by the iLanguages which cultivates and progresses children’s language learning through engaging games, songs, stories and activities.
Lessons are designed to provide children with opportunities for listening, speaking, reading and writing with a focus on building key vocabulary and phrases around familiar everyday situations and contexts.
Accompanying native speaker audio helps develop the accuracy of each child’s pronunciation. In order to consolidate the children’s language learning, especially the acquisition of new vocabulary, we use cross-curricular opportunities to provide regular practice for language retrieval and use in meaningful and relevant contexts.
In addition to classroom language learning, the school’s after-school provision also includes weekly French club run by an external company. We also have a French speaker who attends school every other week to have French conversation with Years 5 and 6.