Modern Foreign Languages

Intention

As the National Curriculum states, “learning a foreign language is a liberation from cultural insularity and a window into another way of life and thinking”. It fosters a spirit of co-operation and friendship between people and nations. It improves our cognitive abilities and is a great lifelong personal asset. It gives us a new outlet for personal expression. Learning an additional language increases the likelihood we will go on to learn others still.

At Earlsmead Primary, already home to many languages among staff and students, we teach Spanish, the world’s third-largest language and the tongue of Britain’s most popular holiday destination.

In our Spanish lessons we aim to ensure our students:

• understand and respond to spoken and written language from a variety of real sources including songs, rhymes and stories

• speak with increasing confidence and fluency, finding ways of communicating what they want to say, including through conversations, giving opinions and asking questions, and continually improving the accuracy in their speech

• can write at varying length from memory, for different purposes and audiences, beginning with words and phrases, and building to sentences and short stories, messages and presentations

• discover and develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the language studied, and the cultures it is used in

Implementation

At Earlsmead Primary we provide a curriculum which balances different parts of language – spoken and written. We do this by planning and teaching a sequence of lessons which introduce new ideas and words, then later give an opportunity for students to use them in different ways.

Our lessons provide opportunities for pupils to:

· hear from native Spanish-speakers

· learn the different letter sounds of Spanish, including how they differ across the Spanish-speaking world, and practise reading

· practise important phrases in games, songs, and role-play or partnered work

· learn the building blocks of Spanish sentences from the most common verbs, to common prepositions and the articles

· write with what we know for different purposes and audiences

· understand relevant aspects of grammar such as recognising masculine or feminine nouns, how verbs change, how adjectives agree or how to say plural nouns

· learn about the culture of some different Spanish-speaking nations around the world

At Earlsmead Primary we value our existing Spanish speakers from Spain, Caribbean and Latin American backgrounds. We aim to help them extend their spoken and written language with suitably challenging tasks and materials.

Impact

Earlsmead Primary students are prepared to remember and speak basic phrases, read and listen to the language in excerpts, stories and songs, to have some familiarity with how the Spanish language works and to begin to use what they know independently.

They are helped to learn all the sounds of Spanish and to read new words with a high degree of accuracy over time. They are prepared by the end of Year 6 to speak and write with what they know in different situations from short conversations to story-telling or writing letters. They will understand particular features of the Spanish language that are different from English or other languages they know.

They will learn where Spanish is spoken in the world and about life in some different Spanish-speaking countries.

Students who already speak Spanish as a home language are encouraged to develop their language further

Our students will be prepared to become language learners in secondary school and beyond.