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Statement of Intent: Languages

At Burhill Primary School, we value modern foreign languages as an important part of the children’s entitlement to a broad and balanced curriculum. A high-quality languages education should foster children’s curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world.

All Key Stage 2 pupils must now learn a second language as part of the National Curriculum and we have chosen to teach French at Burhill Primary School. The teaching of French across all year groups in KS2 provides an appropriate balance of spoken and written language and lays the foundations for further foreign language teaching at KS3. To support this, an optional Spanish club is offered to Year 6 pupils.

The National Curriculum for languages aims to ensure that all pupils:

• understand and respond to spoken and written language from a variety of authentic sources;
• speak with increasing confidence, fluency and spontaneity, finding ways of communicating what they want to say, including through discussion and asking questions, and continually improving the accuracy of their pronunciation and intonation;
• can write at varying length, for different purposes and audiences, using the variety of grammatical structures that they have learnt;
• discover and develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the language studied.

At Burhill, the learning of languages is fun and rewarding for all children. Through our teaching, we inspire pupils to develop a love of languages and to expand their horizons to other countries, cultures and people. We help children grow into curious, confident and reflective language learners thereby equipping them with the means to explore different languages, leading, in the future, to study and work in other countries.

Pupils start formal learning in French in Year 3, with lessons focusing on listening, speaking and additionally, reading and writing in the foreign language. In each year in Key Stage 2, vocabulary and grammatical concepts are introduced and reviewed to deepen pupils’ knowledge in the subject.