Intent

At Beechwood, we want our pupils to think for themselves and care for others. Through our learning modern foreign languages, we want pupils to develop a knowledge and respect of a range of cultures and countries, allowing them to be caring citizens who follow our British Values. In our French lessons, we want pupils to use their prior knolwedge of word etymology to work out new words and be able to have conversations with confidence. 

It is our intent for children to leave Beechwood with an understanding of both written and spoken French. Having developed confidence in another language along with their peers, the pupils at Beechwood understand how important it is to continue their learning as they progress to secondary school; we hope to lay the foundations for future language learning.

Implementation

From Year 3, up to Year 6, our children are taught the essential knowledge and skills taken from the National Curriculum 2014. Our well-planned journey through the French curriculum helps our pupils to build upon their prior learning and apply past knowledge to new situations; we are passionate about ensuring that our children’s learning transfers to their long-term memory. To ensure that this happens we constantly revisit concepts and themes both within year groups and subjects and across year groups and different subjects where applicable.
As soon as children come to our school, they are encouraged to use languages incidentally such as through the register. As the children move into Key Stage 2, staff will use phrases such as ‘levez-vous and en va faire l’appel during lessons in other curriculum areas in order to embed the use of French into everyday language.

Through our carefully chosen Rigolo scheme, we aim to introduce the learning of the French language and the understanding of its culture in enjoyable and stimulating ways. We hope to embed the essential skills of listening, reading, speaking and writing. We aim to build the children’s ‘culture capital’ so that they are aware of similarities and differences between cultures.

Impact

By using retrieval tasks at the start of each lesson, as well as consistent questioning, we are able to assess the impact of our teaching and learning in French. This then informs our next steps. 

Through our in in-depth approach to French, children are confident in usuing day to day language and are able to lay foundations for future learning as they progress onto secondary school.