Our Intent in MFL.

At Thomas Harding, we provide an ambitious and exciting Modern Foreign Languages curriculum which develops language fluency through increased focus on oracy, leading to developed reading and writing skills. The curriculum has been carefully structured so that vocabulary, grammatical structures and phonology is revisited and built upon each year to ensure progression of knowledge and skills.

Our children are given opportunities to communicate for practical purposes through a range of purposeful activities. We want the children at Thomas Harding to be able to express their thoughts, ideas and opinions with increasing confidence and spontaneity while developing accurate pronunciation.

Our MFL curriculum is underpinned by our ASPIRE values. Learning a foreign language is challenging but we strongly believe that all pupils can be successful language learners by aspiring highly and demonstrating resilience in lessons.

In addition, our MFL curriculum develops curiosity for other languages and cultures, and increases cultural capital by providing pupils with rich opportunities to learn about the wider world.

Implementation of MFL 

• All class teachers teach MFL to their classes each week.
• The curriculum is reviewed each year to ensure relevance and also to ensure that there is a coherent progression of skills.
• Each lesson starts with retrieval practice to recap relevant, recent learning.
• All lessons are placed in the context of the ‘Big Picture’ of both the current unit, but also the curriculum links (both backward and forwards) that each lesson will build upon and towards.
• Speaking and listening activities are built into every lesson to promote language fluency.
• Vocabulary banks are used consistently for ALL learners across school, to support learning.
• Children working at a Higher level (More able) have been identified and teachers ensure that the lesson is suitably challenging for all learners.
• Relevant and purposeful opportunities are identified to exploit meaningful cross curricular links (e.g. International Day of Cultures and teaching Japanese as part of Art Fortnight).
• Written work is recorded in a variety of ways (e.g. comic strip, extended piece of writing, labelled images).
• Teachers incorporate an MFL homework option in the ‘Pick n Mix’ homework grid, to encourage parental participation and support.
• MFL staff meeting held regularly to share good teaching practice and to develop teacher subject knowledge
• Monitoring shows that teaching ideas are implemented by class teachers on a consistent basis as a result of high quality CPD
• After school MFL club exposes children to a different language (German)

Impact of our MFL Curriculum

• Monitoring by MFL subject leader, supported by SLT is undertaken through work scrutiny, learning walks and pupil/teacher interviews.
• Pupil interviews – children are able to recall exciting speaking and listening opportunities in lessons and during our International Day of Languages.
• Cross curricular links build cultural capital exposing children to a wider range of experiences.
• Target Tracker is used to assess pupils progress and attainment against the NC statements, and children are recorded as working below, at or above Age Related Expectations (ARE)