French

The Oaks French vision

At The Oaks we strive for excellence in everything we do.

At the Oaks, we strive to prepare pupils to become future global citizens by developing their communication and literacy skills in order to lay foundations for future language learning, equipping them with the skills necessary to thrive in a diverse nation and global society.

The learning of a foreign language provides a medium for cross-curricular links and for reinforcement of knowledge, skills and understanding developed in other subjects. We strive for pupils to make connections by using what they have learnt in the past to help them with their current learning and prepare them for future learning.

1. Language of Learning

We strive for our children to become excellent language-learners through the development of the following core values and skills:

to be an independent thinker
to articulate my thoughts
to be resilient
to believe in myself
to be reflective

2. Reading

Reading is one of the four key skills of language learning at The Oaks. Children are introduced to key French graphemes to enable them to decode new French vocabulary. Authentic French books have been selected to support the learning and language acquisition across the curriculum. We strive for pupils to access new texts by being reflective and resilient. By believing in themselves, using prior knowledge, cognates (Do any of these new words have the same ancestral roots to another language I know?), pupils are able to articulate their thoughts with their partners and then with the class to access new learning.

3. Cultural Capital

We strive for pupils to develop a genuine interest and positive curiosity about foreign languages. We want our pupils to feel that they are global citizens. Learning another language enables pupils to develop a deeper understanding of other cultures and the world around them with a better awareness of themselves, others and cultural differences. We believe learning another language opens up doors for their futures.

4. Oracy

Speaking and listening are two of the four key skills in language learning. Our pupils learn ‘through talk’ as well as learn ‘to talk’. Our curriculum is designed to enable pupils to progressively acquire, use and apply a growing bank of vocabulary, alongside the necessary grammar. Pupils are taught pronounce and recognise key French phonemes and we strive for pupils to be reflective, notice patterns and make connections to these, in future language acquisition. We then link the learned pronunciation to the written word- the final of the four key skills.

5. High expectations

We strive for our children to have access to high-quality resources and develop teaching and learning to ensure that our curriculum reflects and is adapted based on the needs of the children. The combination of these necessary skills enables our learners to use and apply their French learning in a variety of contexts and provides a foundation for their future language learning.

French Long Term Plan