Intent:

Our Modern foreign Language curriculum aims to develop our children’s love of learning about other languages and cultures and helps provide them with an understanding of the world. We aim to build the children’s ‘cultural capital’ so that they have a knowledge and understanding of the richness and diversity between cultures. All pupils at Highfield will be expected to achieve their full potential in their foreign language learning of Mandarin - the aim is that pupils will feel confident engaging in spoken Mandarin and to develop skills in reading, listening and writing. We hope that all pupils will develop a genuine interest and curiosity about languages, finding them enjoyable and exciting and show a desire to continue their language learning past KS2. Although our current MFL taught is Mandarin, we strive to provide children with opportunities to experience a range of other languages and celebrate the growing diversity of our pupils and the languages they speak such as Romanian, Urdu, Bengali and Sign Language. This is achieved through Highfield's language of the half term.

Implementation:

Built on the 2014 national curriculum, our curriculum is mapped out progressively in year 3 and 5 and ensures that children are able to cover the fundamentals of learning a new language by building on previous learning with opportunities to retrieve, reactivate and apply. The specialised teachers deliver high quality and engaging lessons. There is clear progression for the development of speaking and listening and vocabulary acquisition. They follow a sequence of lessons and adapt to suit our pupils covering a wide variety of topics and themes. Pupils are initially taught the ‘core’ vocabulary to ensure that they have a secure understanding of basic words and phrases. This knowledge base is then extended, allowing pupils to expand their recognition of Mandarin vocabulary, subsequently leading them to apply this to conversations and written tasks. Weekly lessons are taught. (45 minutes) Evidence of lessons taught are captured in whole class books.

Impact:

Our MFL curriculum ensures that pupils develop key language learning skills set out by the national curriculum, as well as a love of languages and learning about other cultures. Children in KS2 will speak positively about their learning in Mandarin. Children will have developed the knowledge and skills that will enable them to be become aware that a language has a structure, and that the structure differs from one language to another.The impact of the curriculum is measured through:

• Pupil progress and achievement data

• Learning walks, book monitoring and pupil voice