Foreign Languages

Intent

At Lace Hill Academy, French is taught in Key Stage Two, from Year 3 to Year 6. Every year group is taught by a fluent French speaker as we believe this adds quality and authenticity to the teaching of a language. 

We want our children to leave Lace Hill Academy having a secure foundation in a foreign language before they move to secondary school. Local feeder schools (The Buckingham School, The Royal Latin and Sir Thomas Fremantle) teach French as a language option. Our intent is that our pupils are well equipped for these classes through the basics they are taught at Lace Hill.

Our French curriculum is designed around the six substantive concepts:

• Vocabulary
• Speaking
• Listening
• Reading
• Writing
• Culture

This is how our children learn to be successful linguists and achieve the intent below (also in our golden tail):

• I feel confident using words and phrases in another language
• I can listen to and understand vocabulary in another language
• I can understand and appreciate the culture of other countries
• I can hold a short conversation in another language
• I can read words and phrases in another language
• I can write words in another language

Implementation

The children’s French lessons provide an appropriate balance of spoken and written language and lay the foundations for further foreign language teaching in secondary school. It enables our children to understand and communicate ideas, facts and feelings in speech and writing, focused on familiar and routine matters, using their knowledge of phonology, grammatical structures and vocabulary. Typical French lessons involve engaging games, fun songs and a variety of activities.

Our 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

Impact



At Lace Hill Academy, our aim is for our modern foreign languages curriculum  to enable our children to speak confidently in another language. We aim for our children to be able to hold a short conversation, read key phrases and listen to another language. By the time our children are ready to enter Key Stage 3, they have excellent foundations in which to build upon.

We measure the impact of our modern foreign languages curriculum through monitoring work in books, pupil voice, by taking learning walks and termly data analysis.