Intent

At St Dunstan’s Catholic Primary School, we aim to provide an inclusive MFL curriculum which engages and challenges all pupils.

Our MFL curriculum intends to provide an opportunity for children to experience learning a foreign language and demonstrate that speaking a foreign language in today’s world is a highly valued and useful life skill (e.g. studying or working abroad; coming in contact with the speakers of a foreign language on home ground in professional or social life).

We aim for our children to build up their vocabulary and grammar skills and then gradually become more and more fluent listeners, readers and speakers of a foreign language.

By teaching a foreign language, we also teach respect and tolerance for other cultures.

We want our children to have a ‘have a go’ approach to learning a foreign language and not be afraid of making mistakes and learning from them.

The main aim of our MFL curriculum is to equip the children with basic communication strategies that will, later on, let them develop their understanding and application of a foreign language to the degree that allows natural and easy-flowing communication with the native speakers of the language taught.

Implementation

At St Dunstan’s Catholic Primary School, we follow the MFL national curriculum and use an ongoing informal assessment that checks pupils’ understanding and application of the skills taught regularly. We use the Language Angels learning platform to guide and support our teaching, giving pupils access to high-quality resources and audio/video of native speakers. We have a one-hour MFL lesson each week, and each of these lessons ends with an assessment in the form of an interactive game checking children’s understanding of vocabulary and grammar structure taught in the lesson.

All MFL lessons are planned around a given topic relating to the development of pupils’ vocabulary (e.g. family, colours, countries of the world, numbers) and always contain a grammar-building activity that allows pupils to use the vocabulary they’ve acquired in a context (e.g. asking questions, using the correct order of the words in a sentence, using negations etc.)

Our lessons provide opportunities for practising correct pronunciation and intonation, reading, translating, speaking and writing.

Impact

Children of all ages and abilities will make progress within the MFL curriculum that will enable them to continue to develop their fluency in their further education.

Children in lower KS2 will be able to understand and use the basic French vocabulary and grammatical structures to communicate simple ideas in speech and writing.

Children in upper KS2 will continue developing their vocabulary and grammar, slowly becoming more fluent speakers of the foreign language.

Across KS2, all children will be exposed to French culture, enabling them to understand the country's specifics and its people.

Children can showcase what they’ve learned in their French lessons during our International Days.

The teaching of MFL will be consistent and effective across the school to ensure that children of all abilities make progress.

Children at St Dunstan’s will be proud to show off their work and produce work of high quality.