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MFL

Intent

At Merrylands Primary School and Nursery, we believe that learning a foreign language is an essential part of being a member of a multi-cultural society. Our aim is to provide all children with a high quality education in Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) which in turn develops their love of learning about other languages and cultures as well as their own. This should foster children's curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world.

French is the language taught at Merrylands. Our aim is that by the end of Key Stage 2, children will have acquired an understanding of both spoken and written French as well as have confidence to hold conversations with others, preparing the children for further learning of foreign languages at secondary school.

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

Implementation

At Merrylands, we follow the Salut! Scheme of work. This scheme provides a wide range of learning opportunities and enables children to meet the end of Key Stage Attainment targets outlined in the National curriculum.

In lessons, the scheme enables children to express their ideas and thoughts in another language and to understand and respond both verbally and in written form. It also provides opportunities for children to communicate for practical purposes, with a focus on acquiring and understanding essential vocabulary.  Through speaking and listening, reading, writing and comprehension based activities, we enable children to explore all forms of acquiring a language and instil a sense of enjoyment in this subject area.

Each unit of study aims to build upon prior learning and units are sequenced to enable pupils to purposefully build on learning from previous sessions to aid the retention of key subject and topic-based knowledge. Core units are taught in Year 3, whilst the complexities of French grammar are covered in Year 6.

Impact

We believe that when children leave Merrylands, they will have a natural curiosity and confidence to explore other countries, cultures and languages, welcoming that, in a multilingual society it is a valuable skill to be able to communicate effectively with others in another language. They will therefore be engaged and prepared to continue their language learning journey at Secondary School.

Children’s learning and attainment is evaluated during each lesson and end of unit assessments are recorded using the Merrylands assessment grid.  This information is used to inform future planning.  The subject is monitored regularly to measure the impact of the MFL curriculum content, design and delivery and the outcomes of this monitoring are used to drive forward next steps within the subject.