At Wavendon Gate School, our modern foreign language curriculum is designed to develop the children’s language skills and provide them with the freedom to express themselves with increasing confidence, independence and creativity. It provides our pupils with the opportunity to develop their listening, speaking, reading and writing practice and explore the similarities and differences between English and other languages, ensuring that they are immersed in a rich variety of cultures.
Our curriculum allows children to maximise their potential in French, Wavendon Gate School’s primary language choice, throughout key stage two and introduce our year six pupils to Spanish during the summer term. We believe that introducing a new language at this stage in the children’s learning journey serves to increase their confidence in language learning, deepen their understanding of cultures and the world around them and enable to make informed choices in their future education. On entry to our local secondary school, pupils choose whether to study French or Spanish during key stage three and beyond.
We endeavour to challenge our children by teaching a variety of topics that also support the wider curriculum in subjects such as science, English and maths. The teaching of grammar enables our pupils to speak and write more accurately and fluently and equips pupils with the linguistic skills to unpick and decode unfamiliar language. We believe that the development of communication skills, together with the understanding of the structure of language, lays the foundations for the future study of other languages and supports the progression of literacy skills.
A fundamental aspect of our modern foreign language curriculum is to establish our children’s love of languages. We therefore aspire to provide stimulating lessons taught by using a high-ratio of the target vocabulary and a wide range of strategies to create a fun, dynamic and caring classroom culture, in which learning from others is valued and promoted.