Aims and purpose
This curriculum enables learners to manipulate language so that they can build their own meaning, sentences and structures independently. It develops pupils to be effective communicators who can confidently use their knowledge and skills to become global citizens and lifelong linguists, with a clear understanding of language and culture.
Curriculum principles
Knowledge and vocabulary rich
This principle recognises the important role that knowledge, and vocabulary as a particularly important type of knowledge, plays in learning. Our curriculum has a focus on the most important knowledge in languages: vocabulary, phonics and grammar. These are learned and applied through practice in listening, speaking, reading and writing. We identify and map the most frequently used vocabulary across the curriculum, both in terms of the introduction of new vocabulary and the necessary repetition of vocabulary that has gone before.
- sound-symbol correspondences (the relationship between sounds and letters) which enable pupils to pronounce new vocabulary and recognise their written form, for example [ce]
- grammatical terms to unlock the understanding of grammar concepts, for example ‘grammatical gender’
Sequenced and coherent
A careful and purposeful sequencing of our curriculum content underpins the design of our curriculum, ensuring that pupils are able to build on and make links with existing knowledge. We introduce, for example, the essential verbs ‘to be’ and ‘to have’ early in the curriculum as pupils will use them frequently so that by the time they come to talk about the past, these verbs are firmly grasped and can be applied effectively as the auxiliary verbs that form the perfect tense. Attention is paid to vertical coherence via threads, which map the developments of concepts over time, for example in French, the thread ‘nouns and determiners’ begins with singular ‘avoir’ nouns in year 3, building to using the partitive article and the preposition ‘de’ at secondary.
Evidence-informed
Our evidence-informed approach enables the rigorous application of research outcomes, science of learning and impactful best practice both in education in general and at a subject specific level. For example, the design of our resources reflects findings from Sweller’s cognitive load theory and Mayer’s principles of multimedia learning whilst our lesson design draws on Rosenshine’s principles of instruction. Our approach to teaching grammar aligns with evidence that:
- explicit teaching closes the gap for less naturally analytical learners;
- providing a succinct explanation before practising a grammar feature is more effective than asking pupils to spot patterns;
- bespoke listening and reading activities contrasting pairs of grammar features and making their processing essential to task completion lead to stronger learning than traditional comprehension tasks.
Accessible
Our curriculum is intentionally designed to facilitate high-quality teaching as a powerful lever to support pupils with SEND. In our languages lessons we revisit vocabulary that has been previously taught and use it in different contexts to help embed it. Where appropriate, we use meaningful images to accompany vocabulary to support pupils’ learning and recall.
Subject principles
Knowledge selection is based on frequency which also enables cultural enrichment and the development of a personal repertoire.
Our selection of vocabulary draws on the most frequently used words in French. Where there are lower frequency words included they are necessary for context and are often related to the cultural context of lessons; for example in French ‘le fromage’ and ‘le pain’ which are less frequently used but are useful for cultural context. This ensures pupils have a personal repertoire which will enable them to communicate what they want to say.
National curriculum
There are four aims of the national curriculum. The first is that all pupils should ‘understand and respond to spoken and written language from a variety of authentic sources’. Our curriculum focuses on the most frequently used words so that pupils will understand the majority of vocabulary they encounter.
The second aim is that all pupils should ‘speak with increasing confidence, fluency and spontaneity, finding ways of communicating what they want to say, including through discussion and asking questions, and continually improving accuracy of their pronunciation and intonation’. Pupils are taught the sound-symbol correspondences so that they can pronounce the language confidently. Speaking activities give pupils regular opportunities to use language to communicate with increasing fluency.
The third aim is that all pupils ‘can write at varying length, for different purposes and audiences, using the variety of grammatical structures that they have learnt’. Our curriculum offers regular opportunities to write. In the early stages pupils write shorter texts with a limited range increasing to writing at length using the wide range of grammatical structures mastered over time. For example, in early key stage 2 pupils might write a short list of things they are taking on a trip.
The final aim is that all pupils ‘discover and develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the language studied’. Pupils encounter writing throughout the curriculum in various forms.