Languages

The languages curriculum fits with our whole school aims to enable students to leave The Grange with a broader knowledge of their chosen language and an appreciation of other cultures and history for their next step in education, employment or life.

At The Grange, we are committed to the philosophy that each student should:

Have a positive experience of learning a language.

French, Spanish and Urdu are taught, these are historical choices that also reflect our diverse school community. Other languages are available at GCSE depending on student background and staff but have previously included Portuguese, Russian, Italian and Polish . In addition, we work with the local Grammar school to allow students to take German GCSE. Best practise and resources are shared in department meetings, through observations, learning walks and informal conversations between the team. The aim is to create a consistent experience for students across the department.

Be able to successfully and consistently link their skills in MFL to other subjects.

When appropriate, teachers draw parallels between subjects, refer to transferable skills and use rubric to support progress in all subjects and help students to  recognise which MFL skills can be used in other areas or have been used before i.e. the useful nature of cognates within MFL is started in Year 7 across all languages.

Achieve the necessary MFL skills required to succeed in life.

Students are enabled to achieve a functional knowledge of their chosen Language by the Key Stage 3 curriculum that would be useful when travelling/ holidaying abroad. Key Stage 4 MFL is currently optional and builds on the Key Stage 3 experience to include a deeper breadth of grammar i.e. subjunctives and also new topic areas e.g. Environment/ Charity work. For both Key Stages, teachers always use links to real-life or functional contexts whenever possible and also refer to SMSC as part of the scheme of work and should refer to these in lessons. Examples could include ordering food / buying clothes / arranging to go out/ Semana Santa. There are also trips organised on a bi-annual basis to France and Spain depending on student uptake to allow students to have the experience of the different countries and the opportunity to practise their language skills and enjoy the culture and history of another country.

Follow a curriculum that is ambitious and sequenced to show continuous progression and improvement for all students, taking into account their needs and abilities.

At the start of Year 7, students choose a language to study for the entire 3 years of Key Stage 3. This allows them to build a broad vocabulary base from numerous topics and includes the explicit knowledge of 3 verb tenses (present, past and simple future) along with the grammar to prepare them for GCSE. Two other tenses are taught to support these (imperfect and conditional) to allow for extended work that can access higher GCSE levels.

The Key Stage 4 (Year 10-11) curriculum has been sequenced to support the re-visiting of Key Stage 3 vocab and grammar to a greater depth to introduce more challenge to particular topics, as students have more of the skills needed (knowledge recall) to attempt ‘Challenge’ questions. They are also introduced to higher level grammar such as compound tenses and the subjunctive to enable them to access the higher levels (5-9) from Year 10.

For example, Year 10 French start with revision topic of All about Me but this is done to extend their use of adjectives, intensifiers, revise the 3 previously learnt tenses but extend them to include irregulars and revisit and cement their knowledge of a fourth and fifth tense – the imperfect and conditional.

Students are grouped based on their MFL choice and form, this allows us greater flexibility and ensures parity in terms of nationality across the Year group. If needed , French and Spanish can be set into two MFL groups should the breadth of attainment require this . This is discussed in conjunction with their Data Entry scores , attainment, and teacher opinion and is reviewed regularly based on results, teacher feedback, analysis of data and discussions with SLT/Line Managers.

The Key Stage 3 curriculum was updated in September 2020 and was rolled out to all Key Stage 3 year groups . It was linked with the previous SOW and moved across to ensure there were no gaps.

Be exposed to the MFL curriculum in its entirety.

‘Thinking harder’ or Challenge (CH) tasks are used across lessons to challenge students and teachers are encouraged to use those that are relevant to MFL and pitch them accordingly. We are using these in conjunction with a Cognitive Science approach to dovetail CH tasks with concepts such as Spaced learning with reflects our cyclical approach to Grammar, retrieval practice which underpins all our lessons and a great many of our homework tasks and dual coding which highlights the importance of words and pictures in MFL.

Extra tenses may be used where appropriate i.e. an imperfect to extend a past tense opinion or statement.

Tasks in lessons are differentiated when possible. In Year 7 students start with a variety of experience so a great deal of the Year 7 SOW is about building vocabulary and then using this to introduce basic linguistic premises such as adjectival agreement and gender . As a result, they have vocabulary building within to a topic but are then expected to use it within a variety of other constraints, i.e. expressing opinions. Year 8 builds on continuing to observe the basic premises but also include another tense to enable them to start working at a higher level. Year 9 includes yet another and mastery of this means that are them able to access Key Stage 4 and GCSE should they chose.