MFL – Modern Foreign Languages

“You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.” ― Geoffrey Willans.

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” ― Nelson Mandela

“One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way.” ― Frank Smith

Purpose:

Learning a foreign language provides people with liberation from insularity and provides an opening to other cultures. A high-quality languages education fosters students’ curiosity and deepens their understanding of the world. The teaching of MFL (Modern Foreign Languages) enables students to express their ideas and thoughts in another language and to understand and respond to its speakers, both in speech and in writing. It also provides opportunities for them to communicate for practical purposes, learn new ways of thinking and read great literature in the original language. Language teaching should provide the foundation for learning further languages, equipping students to study and work in other countries.

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

• 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 lengths, 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

In MFL students will be confident to tackle challenging translation tasks, thinking about patterns and developing skills to decode languages. They will hold high academic expectations, enabling them to understand how MFL can impact our life within the world of work and travel making informed decisions about further learning opportunities and exciting career pathways, such as:

• Journalism
• Engineering
• Travel and tourism
• Business

Curriculum Features

The MFL Department is dynamic, passionate, and enthusiastic. We endeavour to make learning languages fun and meaningful, providing students with many opportunities for both collaboration and independent work in each lesson. Curriculum overviews are designed to ensure that all four skills (Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening) are covered in every unit. They offer regular opportunities to revisit key skills and previous learning.

Our Key Stage 3 curriculum allows students to:

• Develop building blocks of the language, through phonics, vocabulary, and grammar to enable students to develop linguistic ability
• Expand in depth and breadth across phonics, vocabulary, and grammar in all 4 skills to allow students to confidently express themselves (and the views of others) in the TL
• Build on foundations of language learning skills at KS2 (Key Stage 2), whether students continue with the same language or take up a new one
• Develop language skills, and linguistic knowledge (grammar and vocab)
• Make links between strategies they use and success criteria
• Develop strategies to use when faced with communication difficulties
• Develop strategies and understand relationship between both written and spoken forms of the language

Our Key Stage 4 curriculum allows students to:

• Continue to expand on all aspects taught at Key Stage 3 through access to more challenging texts and recordings
• Communicate opinions and ideas on a range of topics incorporating a range of tenses
• Model and practise more fluent and complex pieces of writing
• Incorporate more complex grammatical structures linked to each topic such as verb conjugation and using a more varied vocabulary to extend sentences
• Use a range of skills within these key areas so that these improve with continued practice

At both Key Stages 3 and 4, there are Formative and Summative Assessments for each unit of work which are completed in class. These allow us to identify gaps in students’ knowledge, enabling us to adapt teaching to the needs of the students. This is achieved through recall task at the start of each lesson as well as the retrieval practice of vocabulary which students have seen in their prior learning.

Enrichment

At Heath Park, students are offered multiple opportunities to see how French can be used outside of the classroom.

There will be a theatre production company who visit to perform a play in French targeted at students in both Key Stage 3 and 4. These performances are a huge success as the students are able to see that through body languages and cues, they are able to understand more in French than what they thought.

We take a number of students to a French cafe workshop at different points in the year and our students are given a taste of what it would be like to go to France.

A trip to St Omer has run in the past and we hope that this is something that our students will be keen to take part in again.

We also celebrate European Day of Languages on the 26th of September as a whole school and students are taught about Bastille Day during a form time activity every July.