Our Vision
At St Bridget’s we have high ambitions for all pupils to become skilled and knowledgeable linguists. We want our languages curriculum to prepare our children for their future as part of a global society. Learning a language in Key Stage Two is the start of a continuous language learning experience for our pupils that will take them up through to Secondary School. We want our children to appreciate different countries, cultures, communities and people and to learn specific knowledge in the French language as well as transferable skills for learning additional languages.
Our Aims
To enable our children to become life-long learners of language and to ensure progression we have chosen to teach French at St Bridget’s because the majority of our pupils go onto West Lakes Academy and learn French there as part of the KS3 curriculum. French is the first language in over 50 countries, and spoken by over 270 million people. Our aim is that once our pupils have studied four years of French at St Bridget’s, that they will be able to enter KS3 with all the confidence and skills they need to make great progress through the modern foreign languages curriculum and hopefully continue their study of MFL into KS4 and beyond.
We value the opportunity for our pupils to learn a language as we know it provides them with further ways to learn about other cultures thus reducing the insularity that can be a feature of living in a coastal community such as ours. Our curriculum aims to provide plenty of opportunities for pupils to learn in an exciting way that fosters their curiosity about words and languages.
Our Curriculum
We have selected a curriculum that includes subject knowledge videos to ensure that all staff who have not got experience of speaking French fluently or who haven't studied it to A Level standard are able to learn the skills they need to teach their lessons confidently. Our Languages Curriculum covers all national curriculum requirements by focusing on the key components of learning a new language:
- Speaking and listening,
- Reading,
- Writing,
- Grammar,
- Language learning strategies and
- Intercultural understanding.
It offers our pupils:
- the opportunity to speak French with increasing confidence, fluency and spontaneity;
- an appropriate balance between spoken and written content in their lessons;
- clear understanding of the grammatical features of the French language and
- increasing understanding of the phonology of the French language.
Combining all these elements, using knowledge organisers and knowledge notes allows our children to benefit from the reduction in cognitive load that is central to the curriculum across our school as pupils use similar systems in all written subjects.
French Curriculum