French
Here you will find:
- Airedale Academy's French Curriculum Intent Statement
- Curriculum Implementation - French Specific
- Curriculum Impact French Specific
- Key Stage 3 (Year 7, 8 & 9) Assessment Overview
- Year 7 French Curriculum Overview
- Year 8 French Curriculum Overview
- Year 9 French Curriculum Overview
- GCSE (Year 10 & 11) Curriculum Overview
Airedale Academy’s French
Curriculum Intent Statement
As a member of Northern Ambition Academies Trust, we ensure that our curriculum is ambitious, rich in skills and knowledge, develops independent learning, promotes diversity, curiosity and tolerance of other cultures alongside incorporating the Trust’s values of Ambition, Bravery and Respect.
Airedale Academy’s French curriculum intent:
● provides challenging learning opportunities for all students and celebrates the inclusion of students 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 students to build their knowledge and skills over time. All topics build upon students’ abilities in listening, speaking, reading and writing
● provides engaging topics that meet the needs of our students 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 students’ 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 students 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 students 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 students 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.
Implementation
● 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 students’ 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 students to be independent and resilient language learners with cultural awareness and appreciation.
● We expect that through the teaching of key grammatical structures students will be able to adapt the language for their own use and purposes.
● We expect students to be able to understand key classroom terms in the target language
● We expect students 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.
Impact
● 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 students 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 students 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 students will go on to study languages at GCSE and beyond.