Modern Foreign Languages

At Queensgate we believe that language learning provides a valuable educational, social and cultural experience for our children. We recognise that learning another language gives children a new and broader perspective on the world, encouraging them to understand their own cultures and those of others.

We encourage our children’s confidence and we strive to stimulate and encourage our children’s curiosity about language. The linguistic skills gained lay foundations for further language learning. We recognise that language learning helps our children to develop communication skills, including key skills in listening, speaking, reading and writing. We promote an active learning of languages using a range of teaching methods implemented to ensure that the children are developing their linguistic skills to be secondary ready.

We aim to enable our children to make progress in weekly taught French lessons in all KS2 classes where we continually develop and extend our children’s knowledge of how language works. We also aim to provide our children with the confidence and independence to explore and be able to attempt manipulation of the structure of language. Our school follows a live scheme which is continually updated and revised in order to meet with current curriculum standards. The children immerse themselves into languages through activities consisting of actions, rhymes, stories, song, drama, grammar focus, video clips, air writing, sentence structure, dictionary work and many more creative ways to extend, embed and combine language skills. This in turn enables our children to express their ideas and thoughts in French and to understand and respond to its speakers, both in speech and in writing. 

The national curriculum for languages aims to ensure that all pupils:

• 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
• can 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.

‘Learning a foreign language is a liberation from insularity and provides an opening to other cultures.’ National Curriculum, Languages Programmes of Study: Key Stage 2