Languages

Language Intent

A high quality languages education should foster children’s curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world. At Ridgeway Farm we are committed to ensuring that competence in another language enables children to interpret, create and exchange meaning within and across cultures. It also helps children develop skills that will open further opportunities later in life. The teaching of Spanish in KS2 provides an appropriate balance of spoken and written language and lays the foundations for further foreign language teaching at KS3.

We believe that learning a foreign language is a necessary part of being a member of a multi-cultural society and provides an opening to other cultures. At Ridgeway Farm we aim to foster the children’s curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world.

The 2014 National Curriculum for Modern Foreign Languages aims to ensure that all children:

• Understand and respond to spoken and written language from a variety of authentic sources.
• Are able to speak with increasing confidence, fluency and spontaneity, finding ways of communicating what they want to say, including through discussion and asking questions, and that they are continually improving the accuracy of their pronunciation and intonation.
• Can write at varying length, for different purposes and audiences, using the variety of grammatical structures that they have learnt.
• Discover and develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the language studied.

Language Implementation

Children are introduced to Spanish from Year 3 and receive a weekly 30 minute lesson, throughout their time in Key Stage 2. We follow the Language Angels scheme of work and this enables the children to develop early language acquisition skills that facilitate their understanding of the patterns of language and how these differ from, or are similar to, English.

Lessons across the Key Stage support the skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing:

• Children are taught to listen attentively to spoken language and respond, joining in with songs, rhymes and games.
• Children develop an appreciation of a variety of stories, songs, poems and rhymes in Spanish that are delivered through the curriculum content.

The children are assessed in their Spanish listening, speaking, reading and writing skills during the summer term.

Language Impact

Our languages curriculum will ensure all pupils develop key language learning skills set out by the national curriculum, as well as a love of languages and learning about other cultures.

Children will demonstrate a positive attitude to language learning and will achieve age related expectations.

Children are also provided with a variety of extra-curricular opportunities to promote their engagement in the subject.

Teachers use assessment for learning to monitor progress and to assess the impact of lessons to ensure children are challenged and supported appropriately.