St Martin's Catholic Primary School

Intent

At St Martin's Primary, we aim to widen children's view and understanding of the world through the teaching of languages. We believe that learning a foreign language is a fundamental skill which allows children to access a multi-cultural society and introduces children to the global world. Therefore, it is our intent to teach languages so that children gain confidence, knowledge and transferrable skills in languages to help and inspire them to progress with languages in their further education.

Implementation

The Kapow French scheme of work is designed with six strands that run throughout. These are:

• Speaking and pronunciation

• Grammar

• Listening

• Intercultural understanding

• Reading and writing

• Language detective skills

Through the Kapow Primary French scheme, pupils are given opportunities to communicate for practical purposes around familiar subjects and routines. The scheme provides balanced opportunities for communication in both spoken and written French, although in Year 3 the focus is on developing oral skills, before incorporating written French during Year 4 and beyond.

The Kapow Primary scheme is a spiral curriculum, with key skills and vocabulary revisited repeatedly with increasing complexity, allowing pupils to revise and build on their previous learning. Lessons incorporate a range of teaching strategies from independent tasks, paired and group work including role-play, language games and language detective work. The Kapow scheme of work focuses on developing ‘language detective skills’ and developing an understanding of French grammar, rather than on committing to memory vast amounts of French vocabulary. 

Impact

The expected impact of following the Kapow Primary French scheme of work is that children will:

• Be able to engage in purposeful dialogue in practical situations (e.g., ordering in a cafe, following directions) and express an opinion.
• Make increasingly accurate attempts to read unfamiliar words, phrases, and short texts.
• Speak and read aloud with confidence and accuracy in pronunciation.
• Demonstrate understanding of spoken language by listening and responding appropriately.
• Use a bilingual dictionary to support their language learning.
• Be able to identify word classes in a sentence and apply grammatical rules they have learned.
• Have developed an awareness of cognates and near-cognates and be able to use them to tackle unfamiliar words in French, English, and other languages.
• Be able to construct short texts on familiar topics.
• Meet the end of Key Stage 2 stage expectations outlined in the national curriculum for languages.