French
French
Our Vision at Netherthorpe
Bonjour et bienvenue! Please read on to find out more about French at Netherthorpe.
Our Intention:
It is our intention to equip children with a love of learning French that can build and link to their understanding of English and the wide range of home languages that our children (approximately 21 languages). We want our children to find links between words in different languages (cognates) that will help with develop their understanding and love of words and will help them to make connections between words and across languages.
We want to build firm foundations in French that children will be able to use as they move on to secondary school so that they will be able to continue to study French or another language with confidence and enthusiasm.
We also want to enable our children to find out about a variety of aspects of French life and culture and make comparisons and links with life in modern Britain and other countries across the world.
Implementation and Curriculum Aims:
We are very lucky at Netherthorpe as we have French speakers among the staff. Therefore, we are able to deliver a fun and engaging weekly French lesson to our pupils in KS2.
Over the course of each half term our children are exposed to a range of language experiences and are given the opportunity to become more confident at:
- Listening and joining to French language
- Reading and showing understanding of words, phrases and simple sentences
- Engaging in short conversations and expressing opinions
- Appreciating stories, songs, poems and rhymes in French
- Writing phrases from memory
- Translating French to English and English to French
- Learning about France and aspects of everyday life and culture in French other French speaking parts of the world.
We teach French using a two year rolling programme that is separated into three terms and differentiated to include progression between year groups. We place a great emphasis on praising effort and success; we encourage children to listen to the French language to support pronunciation before introducing words in writing. By doing this, children are encouraged to speak French as they hear it without imposing English pronunciation.
Our next step is to create a progression of key vocabulary that we share with children, parents and carers so that children can continue to practise speaking French more easily outside of the classroom with parents and carers.
Impact:
We measure progress regularly by mini quizzes and by recapping vocabulary from previous topics to keep it fresh in children’s minds. We also take part in oral and written comprehensions towards the end of topics.
We use a combination of teacher assessment, along with the more formal tests to make an assessment as to whether children are Developing, Securing or Embedding their knowledge and understanding of French. When making these judgments, we also take into account how confident and willing to ‘have a go’ children are at conversing in French.
Our love of French can be witnessed in class assemblies, during which we almost invariably sing one or more of the songs we have learned, and also in the animation with which our children hold conversations about everyday topics IN FRENCH!
Merci.
