MODERN FOREIGN LANGUAGES AT LINGS
Children at Lings Primary School learn Spanish in their Modern Foreign Languages lessons. They do this from Year 3 upwards.
Learning a foreign language is a valuable educational, social and cultural experience for all pupils. It provides an opening to other cultures and encourages children's curiosity and creativity about language and the world around them. The 2014 National Curriculum for Modern Foreign Languages aims to ensure that all children:
- Understand and respond to spoken and written language from a variety of authentic sources.
- Are able to speak with increasing confidence, fluency and spontaneity, finding ways of communicating what they want to say, including through discussion and asking questions, and that they are 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.
We are committed to ensuring that learning a foreign language enables pupils to express their ideas and thoughts, and to understand and respond to its speakers, both in speech and in writing. We recognise that competence in another language enables children to interpret, create and exchange meaning within and across cultures.
At Lings Primary, we are committed to ensuring our MFL teaching provides the foundation for learning further languages, as well as the means to access international opportunities for study and work later in life. The teaching of Spanish in Key Stage 2 (KS2) provides an appropriate balance of spoken and written language and lays the foundations for further foreign language teaching at KS3.
We use the Primary Languages Network programme and resources to support our teaching and learning of Spanish. This is supplemented through the use of spoken Spanish in the classroom beyond the timetabled lesson, which includes its use to give basic instructions, answer the register and refer to familiar objects in the classroom. This enables the children to develop early language acquisition skills that facilitate their understanding of the patterns of language and how these differ from, or are similar to, English.