Languages

Through language teaching we aim to develop a genuine interest and positive curiosity about foreign languages, finding them enjoyable and stimulating.

While many of our pupils are bilingual, with a range of home languages, learning a Modern Foreign Language remains an important part of our Key Stage Two curriculum.

The secondary schools that the majority of our children transition to all offer several Modern Foreign Languages (M.F.L.) to their pupils. Overwhelmingly, these are the Latin based ‘Romance languages’. Therefore, after assessing our current staff’s relative strengths and weaknesses relating to these offerings, we have elected to provide our children with a M.F.L. Programme of Study for French. 

The study of an additional language supports children’s general literacy and oracy, by raising awareness of their own language and thereby enriching their understanding of all language. Additionally, our French curriculum encourages our children to be open minded about another culture whilst fostering a curiosity for the wider world. 

French at Yorkmead is about fun, communication, confidence building, developing learning strategies, learning about similarities and differences and respecting others. From Year Three, our children experience a French lesson weekly, which is delivered using the ‘Salut’ scheme of work which fully implements the National Curriculum for foreign languages with each National Curriculum statement broken down into progressive, measurable learning steps for each year group. 

Year 3

Core units 1-3, Animals, Food, At School

The first stage is aimed at absolute beginners. The core units introduce basic language like colours and numbers that will be essential for the rest of the course. It also has three simple topic-based units to spark children’s interest.

Year 4

Playtime, My Home, My Town, Describing People, The Body, Sport

Stage 2 starts to introduce some more varied language and sentence structures, including sentences in the third person, but all in contexts that the children will be familiar with.

Year 5

On Holiday, Eating Out, Hobbies, A School Trip, Seasons, the Environment

Stage 3 contains more complex vocabulary and sentence structures. Children will learn to use adjectives to add detail to their sentences and talk about their hobbies and holidays.

Year 6

Actions in France, Family, a Weekend with Friends, the Future, Jobs

Stage 4 gives children a taste of other tenses. Using the perfect and near future tenses, children will talk about what they’ve seen and done, and what they’re going to do in the future.

Over the course of Key Stage Two, children cover six core units which give our children opportunities to hear French spoken by a native French speaker, talk and write in French, read simple stories and sing in French too. 

While our children will not leave us as fluent French speakers, they will have made substantial progress in French to ensure they have laid the foundations for further study of a Latin based foreign language at secondary school. 

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