Intent

Learning a foreign language provides ‘an opening to other cultures’ (National Curriculum 2014) and at St Mary’s we aim for every child to develop confidence and competence in Spanish. All children will discover and develop an appreciation for the Spanish language and develop their communication skills, presented in both spoken and written words. The intent for our MFL curriculum is that the teaching will provide the foundation for learning further languages as they move onto their secondary education and beyond.

Implementation

In the Early Years at St Mary’s, children start to know and understand that different languages exist. They are introduced to different languages through their peers, as well as being provided with opportunities to use them, for example, when answering the register.

In Key Stage 1 and 2, we use the Language Angels scheme to deliver our MFL curriculum. Whilst the National Curriculum for MFL is only statutory in Key Stage 2, we start ‘Early Language’ units in Key Stage 1 as we believe it is important to introduce the children to Spanish earlier to support language and vocabulary acquisition. Through the Language Angels scheme, the four key language learning skills; listening, speaking, reading and writing are taught and all necessary grammar is covered in an age-appropriate way across the primary phase. This enables our children to use and apply their learning in a variety of contexts. Children will progressively acquire, use and apply a growing bank of vocabulary, language skills and grammatical knowledge organised around age-appropriate topics and themes - building blocks of language into more complex, fluent and authentic language.

In Key Stage 1, one unit is covered per year in the Summer term. This increases to two units per year in Year 3 (covered in Autumn term), three units in Year 4, 4 units in Year 5 and 6 units in Year 6. These are taught across the Autumn term as well as in Spring term for Year 5. The units covered in Year 6 are taught across the year.

Our MFL curriculum is further enriched through our World Culture Day, where children across the school are exposed to and celebrate a range of cultures, including their languages.