French
Curriculum Intent
The MFL department aims to support students to understand life and culture in French-speaking countries to encourage receptiveness and adaptability to new experiences. We aim to develop confident language learners who are resilient and able to communicate effectively and confidently in French, building skills in listening, speaking, reading and listening. We endeavour to make learning French enjoyable and meaningful, providing students with a variety of language learning opportunities. We ensure that students have a sound understanding of oral communication skills as well as access to enriching reading and listening materials in order to progress readily to the next stage of their learning. We aim to develop independent learners by ensuring that learning in the classroom is enhanced through self-study.
Curriculum Outline
Year 7
Cycle 1: Students are able to ask and answer questions about themselves, their name, age and birthday. Extension work will include the ability to describe ones nationality and some physical features including hair and eyes. Using the EPI method of teaching there is a focus on speaking and phonics.
Cycle 2: Students are able to talk about which food and drinks they like and dislike, providing justified opinions. Pupils will learn the regular ‘er’ present tense through manger and the irregular boire and adjectival endings and learn about the partitive articles du, de la, des.
Cycle 3: Students are able to talk about what they like and dislike doing in their free time and provide justified opinions about these activities, including how often they do them.
Year 8
Cycle 1: Students are able to describe the school subjects they like and dislike, revisiting adjectives in a different context. Like in year 7 the focus remains on speaking and writing with phonics taught explicitly throughout the year.
Cycle 2: This cycle of work introduces the key grammar point of the reflexive verb, taught through the topic of daily routine. This allows pupils to learn times of the day, an introduction to modal verbs in the present tense and a variety of daily activities.
Cycle 3: Students are able to talk about hobbies in the past tense for the first time learning the key perfect tense.
Year 9
Cycle 1: This cycle of work introduces pupils to the topic of relationships so pupils will be able to describe their own characters, bringing back physical features from year 7, and how they get on with friends and family using je m’entends. As in years 7 & 8 the EPI method is used with explicit phonics teaching to ensure pupils communicate well in the written form and orally.
Cycle 2: Students are able to describe a typical day in the past and future, bringing together the wide variety of linguistic structures and tenses that they have learnt over the course of Key Stage 3.
Cycle 3: Students are able to discuss where they live, what is in their neighbourhood and what one can do there, as well as include increasingly sophisticated constructions to describe their opinions about this. Through habiter pupils revisit the present tense of regular’ er’ verbs, are introduced to the conditional tense and revisit modal verbs.
GCSE
Year 10
At GCSE level, students will cover a range of topics that build upon those learnt in Years 7, 8 and 9, whilst continuing to develop their skills in the 5 key areas: reading, writing, speaking, listening and translation. The curriculum is also designed to be culturally rich, to ensure a deeper understanding of life in the Francophone countries, as well as encourage students to debate the pros and cons of controversial issues. The curriculum reflects the changes brought in by AQA for 2026 exams onwards.
These are the topics taught at GCSE, the first 5 of which are covered during Year 10:
Theme 1: People and lifestyle
Topic 1: Identity and relationships with others
Topic 2: Healthy living and lifestyle
Topic 3: Education and work
Theme 2: Popular culture
Topic 1: Free-time activities
Topic 2: Customs, festivals and celebrations
Topic 3: Celebrity culture
Theme 3: Communication and the world around us
Topic 1: Travel and tourism, including places of interest
Topic 2: Media and technology
Topic 3: The environment and where people live
Year 11
Students cover the remaining units whilst also incorporating key exam skills in preparation for the speaking exam just after Easter and the reading, writing and listening exams at the end of Year 11. They will continue developing their ability to manipulate grammatical structures and communicate with confidence when speaking, listening, reading and writing, across all the units listed above.