At Sidney Stringer Primary our children are taught Spanish by a specialist language teacher. The school has a research-based curriculum underpinned by the principle EPI - ‘Excessive Processing Instruction’ (Conti and Smith, 2019);  students learn languages in chunks rather than single lexical items with an emphasis on real-world communication. The chunks include sentence heads and frames selected on the basis of how frequently and effectively they convey a set of communicative functions (e.g. describing people) deemed to be particularly useful in naturalistic interaction in the target language.  Consistent with our current understanding of knowledge retention, learning is designed to be deep and durable and is achieved through skilfully planned instructional sequences which recycle the target language items across all four language skills, through the interleaving of key morphosyntactic structures and through developing effective learning routines and strategies. In order to prevent cue-dependent forgetting, the key target language items are recycled across as wide a range of linguistic contexts as possible.

The Languages curriculum is carefully planned to promote logical student progression in the three pillars of progression: phonics, vocabulary and grammar and the interplay between them. The selection of the content in the three areas arises organically from the communicative objectives of the unit, so that they are not taught as discrete items, but, rather, are constantly interwoven and learnt by the students in communicative contexts, therefore ensuring that they are learnt implicitly through receptive and productive processing. Explicit learning through language-awareness sessions and LREs (language-related episodes) such as corrective feedback, ensures that the students are cognizant of the declarative knowledge required to be autonomous, competent and accurate in communication.  In the early stages of language development, language learning prioritises speaking and listening skill acquisition with an emphasis on meaning, learning then progresses to acquisition across all language skills. Focus on form is constantly intertwined with a focus on meaning in order to create a strong and stable mental representation of the target structures (Ellis and Shintani, 2013). Fluency being the ultimate objective of the curriculum, evidence-based learning activities aiming at automatising knowledge (Nation et al, 2015) are staged at the later stages of each instructional sequence. 

At Sidney Stringer Primary teaching has a clear emphasis on enjoyment and can-do attitude (self-efficacy), enabling students to feel successful and teaching language that allows students to appreciate its relevance. Anxiety working against language acquisition (Graham, 2015) a concerted effort is made in order to stage listening and reading activities which do not ‘feel’ like a test but rather build listening and reading fluency and to made retrieval practice more about interaction than assessment.  The curriculum does not shy away from developing cross-cultural skills and cultural empathy. This is done through talking points and authentic language opportunities.