Modern Foreign Languages
Modern Foreign Languages Curriculum 3 I’s
Vision and Intent
At Maltings Academy, the study of Modern Foreign Languages provides young people the knowledge and skills to communicate their ideas and thoughts in another language. At Maltings, we teach students to express themselves vocally and to build confidence by taking part in conversations, as we strongly believe that languages should be taught vibrantly; it was also demonstrated that if students can express themselves orally, they can transpose their thoughts in writing, at ease. Another important feature of languages at Maltings is reading aloud, to allow students to develop confidence and reading and comprehension skills in general, so they can finally be successful when listening to someone speaking in the foreign language studied.
The Maltings MFL curriculum will enable learners to:
Enable students to develop confidence when communicating in another language.
Empower students to use their knowledge in and out of the classroom.
Develop routines and resilience in students, through well structured lessons.
Enable students to be thinkers and deepen their understanding of the world and different cultures.
Subject Implementation
The MFL curriculum is clearly designed with key knowledge, grammatical structure and skills to ensure students develop balanced information. The topics studied from year 7- 11 are mainly the same ones, presented each year differently, deepened, giving students a greater understanding of the topic and enrichment of language, with lots of added information built on prior knowledge, in a way that allows students to develop their skills and their communication and to enrich their vocabulary.
The curriculum is designed around 3 main points: Vocabulary, Phonics and Grammar. It develops around the following Themes:
1. Identity and culture 2. Local, international and global areas and 3. Current and future studies and employment.
The implementation of the MFL curriculum includes:
Students are issued with a Learning Journey at the start of each term, where their termly learning is clearly mapped with a knowledge organiser which comprises the key vocabulary and grammar taught in the unit.
Students stick their Learning Journeys to their front page, every half-term, to refer back to it and to check the progress of teaching. They all know what they study each term, what is to be assessed at the end of each half-term, how and why, prior to starting new knowledge. This applies to the class teachers, too, with a “Memo” sent to all Languages Members by the Head of Languages with what is to be expected from every week.
In daily teaching, students are being exposed to well structured lessons, comprising a Retrieval that could be easily found in their books ( 10 to 15 minutes), a title and the Learning Objectives, a teaching structure and 3 activities that could be demonstrated in students books, Listening, Reading, Writing and / or Speaking. Extensions and lesson adaptive teaching are part of the teaching/ applying the learning, too. Teachers know their students and they read students' plans, they adapt their teaching.
Students use oracy to learn the new vocabulary, as a “repeating aloud” type of work, every lesson, to learn and to fix their new vocabulary, we tend to use oracy as much as we can, to have a big impact in students learning, with engaging speaking activities/ games.
Students take turns when reading and speaking, they use peer assessments quite often to mark their work in lessons.
Students are exposed to passages that require literacy, reading, comprehension, they are also exposed to many listening tasks, testing authentic native language, to allow them deepen understanding and gaining confidence in language;
All lessons are taught using power-points, we aim to have full trace of daily teaching in students books, to allow addressing gaps in learning and to aim for 100 % accountability in students books;
We use Cross Curriculum links: we address connectivity to all areas of learning including PSHE, Geography, Mathematics, English, Food Tech, History.
Books are marked twice every half-term, with a piece of written work that we call “Creative Writing”, in which students develop sentences, then paragraphs about the bullet points/ ideas discussed, with proper red pen marking and feed-back written by the class teacher and most importantly, green-pen re-written piece of work by the students, to improve their writing skills and to show progress.
We assess at least 2 skills per year, 6 half-terms, as follows: 1. Listening and Reading/ 2. Speaking/ 3. Writing/ 4. Listening and Reading/ 5. Speaking/ 6. End of year Assessments- Listening/ Reading and Writing.
Home learning: every two weeks for KS 3 ( 20 minutes) and weekly for KS 4 ( 1 hour), mainly on the app LanguageNut or Seneca, on all 4 skills, and we aim to insist on the quantity of time spent, to also track a history of progress.
Progress checks are completed after every assessment, with a blue feed-back paper stuck to students books; students know where they are after each assessment, in terms of grades and percentages, what we expect from them, and what they need to do to improve, and we address gaps in learning, together.
Subject Impact
At Maltings Academy, the MFL department aims to show that students are able to take accountability of their learning, of their books, of their work, and also that they can communicate at ease on the things learnt and not only. In and out of lessons, the aim is to show that we take pride in gaining knowledge and we are proud of learning languages, whether for taking it further for GCSE, or just because we aim for enriching our language and culture. The aim of learning a language is to be able to express yourself with happiness and pride, to make connections, to meet new people, and to insist on speaking, to develop our communication skills.
A Maltings Academy MFL student will:
Have pride in their learning and will always achieve the best they can.
Be able to communicate effectively not only by answering a question, but by asking questions, too.
Be able to communicate wisely, in both speaking and writing situations, to be able to cleverly develop sentences from the shortest to longer ones, just by adding more than one opinion, more than a linking word, a negative sentence or two- to a positive statement, some tenses that could be transformed into negative ones, using a range of pronouns. This will transform our learner into a confident speaker, not necessarily relying on extremely rich vocabulary, but relying on clever, structured strategies and well structured lessons through their learning.
Develop cultural capital, with an understanding of the Modern Foreign Language World at large.
Demonstrate empathy when studying different cultures, customs and global issues, areas of interest.
Show resilience and a willingness to go beyond their known world and exceed expectations.
MFL Journey Map
MFL Key Stage 3
MFL Key Stage 4