Modern Foreign Languages

The MFL curriculum sets out the specific knowledge that pupils need at each stage of their learning journey at Central Academy. Key knowledge of vocabulary and grammar has been carefully sequenced to ensure mastery. Committing language to long term memory is essential for pupils to become masters of their new language. Lessons are structured following the I do, we do, and you do principals of teaching – where teachers present new information to the pupils, then the teachers provide deliberate practice, to ensure all learners are making progress and that there are high levels of success, the pupils are then encouraged to complete a task which demonstrates their ability to produce the required skills/structures independently but in a controlled way. Skills, structures, vocabulary, and grammar are reviewed on a regular basis to ensure that pupils can retrieve prior learning. The I do, we do, you do approach, can be understood really clearly in MFL as present, practice and produce. Our approach includes sentence builders which are central to all lessons across the key stages; this allows students to accurately build sentences. Extensive drilling, a focus on listening and speaking at the start of lesson. Use of texts with comprehensible input, that ensures chunks are recycled on an ongoing basis, promoting monthly review. Systematic retrieval practice is planned leading from structured to spontaneous production. 

Students will be assessed formally once a year in Year 7-10 (more regularly in Year 11). The assessments will contain GCSE style questions across both key stages and throughout the year all 4 skill sets as well as translation will be assessed. In addition to formal assessments, there is an expectation that teacher feedback will be given on an extended piece of writing when this has been completed. Extended writing will vary across the year groups and throughout the academic year – it is entirely reasonable to consider a Year 7 piece of ‘extended’ writing in the first term to be sentences translated into German. These informal teacher assessments should be designed around exam board style questions –picture descriptions needing 4 sentences, 40 words with 4 bullet points, 80-90 words with 4 bullet points including past, present, future and opinions and the 130-150-word question with two bullet points. Mark schemes should be shared with pupils before extending writing tasks are completed, to allow for high success rates. WAGOLLs can be shared with classes, so that pupils can see how sophisticated structures have been embedded in extended writing. Speaking, listening and writing skills should be embedded and assessed across a lesson, using Gianfranco Conti structures agreed upon as a department. The curriculum is cyclical in nature and allows for mastery of vocabulary, skills and structures over the 3/5/7-year language learning journey. Sentence builders are shared with each year group on a lesson-by-lesson basis, and this should form part of fortnightly quizzing following on from a homework, this can be accessed through LanguageNut, our online learning platform which can be used to deliver customised content, as well as general content across all skill areas.