Intent
Learning a foreign language is an empowering experience. It provides an opening to other cultures. A high-quality language education at St. Bede’s will foster pupils’ curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world. The teaching will enable pupils to express their ideas and thoughts in another language and to understand and respond to its speakers, both in speech and in writing. It will also provide opportunities for pupils to communicate for practical purposes through the recycling of core structures, learn new ways of thinking and the strategies needed to interact with authentic materials in the original language. Language teaching in year 7 to 9 will provide the foundation for learning further languages and to begin to manipulate language for creative means.
Implementation
From KS3, pupils use sentences builders so they are able to communicate in full sentences immediately. As pupils’ familiarity with the structures in the sentence builders increases, they begin to communicate without having to use the sentence builders. As a result, pupils are able to produce language spontaneously and with increasing fluency and more accurate pronunciation. In order to reduce cognitive load, pupils are introduced to different grammatical structures through the use of sentence builders and, if appropriate, ‘pop up’ grammar lessons take place to introduce pupils to the grammatical rules once they are confident with the key structures. Students will see 3 key tasks in each module. Key task 1 and 2 will check for student understanding of content covered so far and will allow for diagnostic marking. Key task 3 will come at the end of the unit and will be a cumulative test of all aspects of the course which has been covered. All assessments will be followed by a closing the loop activity. The students will carry out learning to repair misconceptions or enrich their lexicon with complex aspects of grammar and vocabulary.
Each lesson will contain an element of retrieval practice. This will often take the shape of a low stakes test at the start of the lesson. This will ensure that students are continually revisiting key concepts and language.