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 Curriculum

Cycle 1: Students are able to ask and answer questions about themselves, their name, age and birthday.

Cycle 2: Students are able to talk about what they like and dislike to do in their free time and provide justified opinions about these including how often they do these things.

Cycle 3: Students are able to describe the school subjects they like and dislike including a second verb tense, the past tense, to describe something they’ve done in the past.

Year 8 Curriculum

Cycle 1: To ensure an aligned starting point due to a change in curriculum plans, our current year 8 students will cover a similar curriculum to our year 7s. In cycle one this includes giving justified opinions of what they like to do in their free time, but to include the conditional tense to talk about what they would like to do.

Cycle 2: Similarly to year 7 in their cycle three, students will learn to be able to describe the school subjects they like and dislike including a second verb tense, the past tense, to describe something they’ve done in the past.

Cycle 3: Students will be able to describe and give justified opinions about where they live and be able to recognise and be able to use some examples of the imperfect tense to describe where they used to live. They will also use the conditional tense to describe their dream home.

Year 9 Curriculum

Cycle 1: Students will be able to describe a typical day at school to include talking about time and routine, school rules, increasingly sophisticated justified opinions around school subjects and teachers they like and dislike.

Cycle 2: 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 of this.

Cycle 3: Students are able to describe a typical day in the past, present and future, bringing together the wide variety of linguistic structures and tenses that they have learned over the course of Key Stage 3.

Year 10 Curriculum

At GCSE level, students will cover a range of topics that build upon those learned 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 encouraging students to debate the fors and againsts of controversial issues.

These are the topics taught at GCSE, the first 5 of which are covered during Year 10.

• Unit 1: Family and relationships
• Unit 2: Technology
• Unit 3: Free Time and Leisure
• Unit 4: Customs and Festivals
• Unit 5: Home and Region
• Unit 6: Social Issues such as healthy lifestyle
• Unit 7: Global Issues such as the environment
• Unit 8: Holidays, Travel and Tourism
• Units 9 – 12: School, school rules, future studies and the world of work

Year 11 Curriculum

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 of the units listed above.