French

Airedale Academy’s French curriculum intent:

• Provides challenging learning opportunities for all pupils and celebrates the inclusion of pupils with special educational needs and disabilities through adapted resources.
• Fosters independence in learners through repetition of key concepts and use of scaffolding across topics.
• Provides opportunities to access out of lesson experiences such as films and school trips.
• Is taught by passionate linguists who are fluent in french, and in some instances are native speakers
• Provides topics that are sequenced effectively, to enable pupils to build their knowledge and skills over time. All topics build upon pupils’ abilities in listening, speaking, reading and writing
• Provides engaging topics that meet the needs of our pupils and the expectations of the national curriculum.
• Addresses potential areas of grammatical difficulty at the outset. Lessons are then planned to address potential areas of difficulty and to remove barriers to pupils’ achievement.
• Embeds knowledge and skills by promoting strategies, including: retrieval practice of high frequency vocabulary, lessons that point towards the development of fluency using what pupils already know (mastery technique).
• Uses recall do it now tasks to allow pupils to link theory between different topics
• Ensures that assessment is extremely clear but not restrictive in both key stages to allow learners to improve independently as well as through verbal feedback.
• Ensures that assessment takes place across all four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing.
• Provides effective formative assessment opportunities to check that knowledge and skills are embedded and mastered, prior to exposing pupils to new content and skills.
• Promotes whole class feedback and dirt time, in order to address individual and whole-class misconceptions which are stored on google classrooms to allow pupils to access at any time.
• Creates a learning environment where pupils feel confident to make errors and learn how to move on from these
• Explores authentic materials to enrich language learning
• Acknowledges festivals, traditions and customs which are relevant to the countries where the target language is spoken
• Creates an awareness of the advantages of language learning both in their personal and working lives
• Improves student’s spiritual, social, moral and cultural understanding.

• Our curriculum is underpinned by the four skill areas of listening, speaking, reading and writing
• We cover the requirements of the KS3 curriculum throughout years 7 to 9 and GCSE at years 10 and 11.
• We are working on our pupils’ abilities to use key vocabulary and skills across a range of different topics, increasing in length and fluency as they progress through year groups.
• We want pupils to be independent and resilient language learners with cultural awareness and appreciation.
• We expect that through the teaching of key grammatical structures pupils will be able to adapt the language for their own use and purposes.
• We expect pupils to be able to understand key classroom terms in the target language
• We expect pupils to identify errors in their written and spoken work and make efforts to improve these independently through reflection/DIRT time.
• We expect that tier 3 vocabulary is reinforced through home learning and regular testing.

• Our main priority at Airedale Academy is to teach and perfect the skills implemented by the NC for French.
• We want every learner to leave our classroom with a wider understanding of a range of cultures, increased confidence and the ability to work with the others.
• The KS3 topics ensure that pupils have a foundation understanding of the topics needing to be covered by the GCSE.
•  By the end of KS3 learners can express themselves in at least two different tenses and express and justify their opinions on a number of different topics and express themselves using the third person.
• By the end of KS4 learners can express themselves in at least three different tenses, justify their opinions on a number of different topics, express themselves using the first, second and third person along with their plural forms and use the passive tense.
• By the end of KS4 pupils will have covered key grammar and concepts enabling them to go on to further language study.
• We hope that with the perusal of the Ebacc qualification and the rise in cultural capital that more pupils will go on to study languages at GCSE and beyond.