KS3 MFL

The vision of languages (French and Spanish) at KS3

The core purpose of learning a language is to be able to communicate with others. Our intention is to build core language skills which will allow our students to reach out to others by learning to introduce themselves, to ask and answer key questions and to describe the world they see around them.

In French and Spanish students will use their newly acquired language with confidence, creativity and spontaneity. They will improve through four key skills:

Listening
Reading
Speaking
Writing

As well as learning to express themselves in a foreign language, we aim for our curriculum to be a gateway to other cultures and points of view, allowing pupils to explore different ways of life and to build them into citizens of the world.

The implementation of the languages (French and Spanish) curriculum at KS3

Our curriculum is taught using the methodology of Dr Gianfranco Conti. This approach is separated into 4 key areas.

Modelling / Awareness Raising - Students are introduced to target language chunks which are drilled extensively through games and speaking activities.
Receptive Processing - Students learn via a varied range of listening and reading tasks, develop decoding skills and fluency .
Structured Production - Students focus on the chunks in more detail and are given the opportunity to produce the target language in more structured tasks.
Expansion and Spontaneity - Students complete planned communicative tasks to allow them to work on their fluency and spontaneity in the target language (speaking/ writing/ grammar) while being more independent.

The languages curriculum at KS3

Both French and Spanish follow the exact same curriculum at KS3.

Year 7

Year 8

Year 9

Unit 1 - All about me and others 1

Names, ages and birthdays.

Unit 2 - All about me and others 2

Physical description, personality and animals.

Unit 3 - Home and town

Home and town description.

Unit 4 - My free time

Sports, free time, TV and films.

Unit 1- Being healthy

Explain what you eat and drinks and whether you are healthy or not

Unit 2 - School

Discussing opinions on school subjects and teachers and School description

Unit 3 - Holidays

Describing a past holiday and expressing opinions.

Unit 4 - Customs and Festivals

Discussing different festivals and describing going to a festival using the past tense

Unit 1 - Free time

Discuss technology and mobile technology and describing a famous person

Unit 2 - Where I live

Describing the area you live in and where you would like to live

Unit 3 - Daily routine

Describing what you usually do at weekends and what you did last weekend

Unit 4 - Relationships

Opinions about family and friends and future plans.

Why is the curriculum sequenced this way?

The French/Spanish course begins in Year 7 with a thorough grounding in the principles of phonics and simple sentence structure through greeting people and introducing themselves, before building an awareness of key grammatical concepts, such as noun gender by talking about their family. They can further expand their ability to express themselves by learning to justify opinions when talking about their free time. The topics studied in Year 8 allow students to give more complex and refined opinions about things which they discuss every day, as well as developing their knowledge of different tenses, discussing past/upcoming meals and holidays. Year 9 starts to look ahead to current relationships and future plans, which requires students to extend their sentences and use multiple time references in their work, which will help to prepare them well for the demands KS4.