Primary Languages

At Tor Bridge Primary School, we intend that children will understand and respond to spoken and written French from a variety of authentic sources and speak with increasing confidence, fluency and spontaneity, finding ways of communicating what they want to say, including through discussion and asking questions, and continually improving the accuracy of their pronunciation and intonation. Children will be able to write at varying length, for different purposes and audiences, using the variety of grammatical structures that they have learnt. We teach French across Key Stage 2. We aid planning with the Language Angels scheme of work to support the teaching and learning of French. This provides clear progression for the development of speaking, listening and vocabulary acquisition, as well as a variety of resources to support the teaching and learning opportunities for pupils.

‘Learning a foreign language is a liberation from insularity and provides an opening to other cultures. A high quality languages education should foster pupils’ curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world. The teaching should enable pupils to express their ideas and thoughts in another language and to understand and respond to its speakers, both in speech and in writing. It should also provide opportunities for them to communicate for practical purposes, learn new ways of thinking and read great literature in the original language. Language teaching should provide the foundation for learning further languages, equipping pupils to study and work in other countries’.

To draw on a quote, in this case from a Czech proverb, ‘you live a new life for every language you speak. If you only know one language, you only live once.’