Welcome to the Languages Department.

Intent

The aim of the language’s curriculum is to incorporate the college’s key principles of Entitlement, Mastery and Consistency so that our students can ‘Learn, Progress and Grow’ regardless of their starting point and background.

The French & Spanish curriculums we have designed are broad and rich in knowledge whilst also ensuring that they are relevant to our demographic context and promote inclusivity. They have been carefully planned to not only teach students how to communicate in the language of study, but also to enrich their knowledge of cultural capital and to embrace the wider world.

We place great importance on primary liaison so that our curriculum complements the KS2 curriculum taught, as our desire is to foster pupils’ curiosity and deepen their previous knowledge.

At KS3 we lay the foundations of the 3 main pillars; phonics, vocabulary and grammar with clear non-negotiables, which form part of our ‘mastery’ programme so that students can become more confident as they move through their languages learning journey and develop self-efficacy. To do this we use a spiral approach where previous learning is revisited, and new knowledge added. We place huge importance on our students becoming independent learners and resilient in their learning both within the classroom and at home.

During lessons, students are encouraged to participate and understand that key elements of learning a language are taking part and learning from our mistakes and that working collaboratively enables us to learn from each other and make progress. By the end of their languages learning journey, we aim to give them confidence in applying their knowledge across a range of topics using grammar concepts that they have mastered.

At KS4 we follow the AQA GCSE French/Spanish specification in Years 10 & 11 and aim to give all our students access to the best possible outcomes in their chosen language.

At KS5 we also follow the AQA French/Spanish specifications.

 

Implementation

The MFL curriculum is taught using common curriculum resources which include Knowledge Organisers, teaching booklets, homework booklets and key routine slides. These incorporate the date in three different time frames, weather, a phonics programme and cultural capital to broaden our students' knowledge of the wider world.

We provide resources for our specialist teachers of languages to form the basis of their teaching, but we have aimed to be, ‘deliberately different’, to enable them to be adaptive in their teaching.

Our teaching is based on Rosenshine’s principles of instruction linked with Tom Sherrington’s Walkthrus and we use a range of pedagogical strategies to give our students, including those with SEND, the skills and support to access our curriculum.

Our curriculum is coherently sequenced so that when we introduce new concepts, we also recycle previously taught content as a way of interleaving and ensuring retention of knowledge. This enables students to make links to language that they have previously learnt, and it embraces our teaching of mastery and non- negotiables.

Each unit of work provides opportunities for students to practice the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing, and we provide scaffolds to enable all students to achieve to the best of their ability.

We share good practice to give our students the best teaching we can offer and to ensure consistency across the year groups and languages.

 

Impact

Students in Languages should be able to:-

• Speak confidently on a variety of topics and give their opinion on them.
• Demonstrate mastery of our identified non-negotiables in different contexts.
• Understand a range of grammatical concepts and apply them to their work.
• Make links to language previously taught when learning new content.
• Use prior knowledge alongside newly taught content across the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing.
• Show an awareness of the different countries that speak the languages they are being taught and embrace different cultures.
• Demonstrate self-efficacy.