Modern Foreign Languages (MFL)
Intent
At Moorhill Primary School the MFL curriculum is international so that there is an understanding, celebration of and respect for the diversity within our school community and the world. We want to develop pupils who are excited to explore the wider world within and outside the classroom and we realise the value of studying multiple languages and cultures as a means of increasing pupils’ cultural capital.
Our Curriculum is designed to cover all aspects of the National Curriculum, which has then been broken down into the skills, knowledge and vocabulary needed. This forms the MFL Curriculum map, which ensures a structured progression building upon children’s prior learning. Planned sequences of learning will take account of prior knowledge and skills development, building upon these to prepare for the next stage in their learning journey.
Implementation
With an approach which takes into account the pupils’ ongoing language-learning journey, we appreciate the need for children to have transferable language skills as opposed to simply knowledge of one specific language, which may then not be continued at high school. At Moorhill, we therefore don’t simply focus on one language but as a school we are fully committed to the value of learning languages from an early age, exploring them via the Language of the Month in KS1.
In lower KS2 we then have a specialist-designed multi lingual programme in years 3-4 which allows pupils to build upon those early language learning experiences to explore, compare and contrast a variety of alphabets, stories, songs, languages and cultures including German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Russian. Pupils then go back to French in Y5 and Y6 where we use a combination of lessons produced by the specialist and, where appropriate, an excellent interactive scheme, Rigolo, which pupils enjoy and which allows them to listen to stories and songs by native speakers as well as take part in interactive games.
There is an annual overview of lessons for each year group which teachers use for their weekly planning. We actively seek links with other countries and are looking to embed this link work across the curriculum; we are involved in a British Council Connecting Classrooms Project with Uganda which will help on our path to achieving the International School Award.
Impact
Our MFL curriculum is well thought out and planned to give children the skills, knowledge and opportunity to be challenged in their thinking and learning and prepare for their next stage of learning and into their future lives. The evidence of having done this multi-lingual programme for the past 5 years has shown that far from disadvantaging the children from making ‘substantial progress in one language’, the skills they have developed over the course of lower KS2 actually makes them better language learners and allows for accelerated progress.
We measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:
Pupil discussions and interviews about their learning
An assessment of standards achieved judged against the skills and knowledge outlined in our Curriculum map
Evidence of pupils work, gathered at the end of units
By the time our children leave Moorhill Primary we want them to:
* 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
*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.
