What is our vision in Modern Foreign Languages?
Languages equip language learners with the confidence, skills and cultural understanding to engage in meaningful experiences with people from other cultures. We aim to help our students to become confident and compassionate learners who want to engage in positive and meaningful relationships both from and beyond their own culture. The curriculum aims to stimulate interest in language learning, develop thinking skills and build the bricks of listening, speaking, reading and writing for future language learning, thereby opening doors for students to study, work and live abroad.
The sequencing of learning over KS3 and KS4 languages curriculum should enable learners to be introduced to and then re-visit core linguistic and grammatical concepts at regular intervals. The curriculum allows for this understanding to be constantly revisited, which allows learners to retrieve knowledge and apply to other parts of the curriculum.
Students will be expected to develop listening skills in order to understand target language conversations and to infer meaning from longer exchanges. Their spoken skills will enable them to express and justify opinions and manipulate grammar to use a variety of tenses, extending ideas and using complex structures. Reading skills will be equally developed to recognise familiar and less familiar vocabulary across a range of texts including literary and authentic texts and to translate from the target language into English. Language learners will be expected to write coherently for different purposes with the specific intention of describing, narrating, expressing and justifying opinions and discussing past and future intentions. Students will have the skills to translate English into the target language. All skills and subject knowledge acquisition is built up cumulatively. Subject knowledge is developed over time, and retrieval strategies are deployed which enable students to master key skills and language.
Students will study one foreign language which is assigned before they begin in Year 7.
The vast majority of students continue with this language until the end of Key Stage 4.
We also offer the opportunity for students to be entered for a ‘community language’, or for an early entry GCSE for bi-lingual students, wherever possible.
Modern Foreign Languages curriculum learning journey
Modern Foreign Languages at KS3
Students learn language through a variety of topics which includes self and family, leisure, holidays, school life and home and local area. Students are taught how to ask and answer questions, justify opinions and explain their ideas. Units of work include a comprehensive grammar programme which covers all the tenses and understanding of gender, word order and other linguistic structures. Students develop the following learning strategies: memorising and applying new phrases, listening for gist and detail, using a bi-lingual dictionary, and applying phonic patterns.
Curriculum learning grids at KS3
Spanish
German
French
Support for students
Modern Foreign Languages Super Curriculum
Key Stage 4 Modern Foreign Languages GCSE
Pearson Edexcel
Thematic contexts
- My personal world
- Lifestyle and wellbeing
- My neighbourhood
- Media and technology
- Studying and my future
- Travel and tourism
| Paper 1 Speaking
25% Task 1 Read aloud Task 2 Role play Task 3 Picture task with conversation |
| Paper 2 Listening & understanding
25% Section A: Listening & responding (questions and answers in English) Section B: Dictation |
| Paper 3 Reading & understanding
25% Section A: Reading and understanding (questions and answers in English) Section B: Translation into English |
| Paper 4
25% Foundation Tier Question 1: picture based task Question 2: choice of 2 open-response questions (40-50 words) Question 3: choice of 2 open response questions (80-90) Question 4: Translation into Target Language Higher Tier Question 1: choice of 2 open response questions (80-90 words) Question 2: choice of 2 open response questions (130 – 150 words) Question 3: Translation into Target Language |
Curriculum learning grids at KS4
Spanish
German
French
Extended Learning Opportunities in Modern Foreign Languages
We would highly recommend one of our trips abroad. We aim to offer trips abroad for Years 9 and 10. These include cultural visits to France and Spain and a well-established exchange to Haywards Heath’s twin town in Germany.
Further Education & Career Pathways in Modern Foreign Languages
How can parents and carers support learning ?
Parents can support by encouraging students to adopt good learning habits around accumulating vocabulary related to the programme of study.