French, German and Spanish

Key Stage 3

Key Stage 3 focuses on the pupil and his/her immediate environment, namely family, home, interests and school. Later, the curriculum broadens to encompass social and environmental issues, healthy living, and other important and relevant aspects of everyday life.

Lessons are taught in the target language, and pupils are encouraged to participate in the target language as much as possible. This helps to increase the pupils’ self-confidence and ability to communicate.

Pupils are assessed in all four skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) at the end of each module in all languages. Pupils’ work and progress is monitored through assessments, regular homework and teacher feedback. By the end of KS3, most pupils are able to manipulate language and tenses very successfully; this provides a solid foundation for work at GCSE level. Pupils are encouraged to become independent learners and develop the necessary language skills, which will enable them to achieve high grades at GCSE.

Key Stage 4

With all the skills acquired at KS3, pupils are ready to embark on the GCSE course. This comprises four “themes”: my world, holiday time and travel, work and lifestyle and the young person in society. These themes are divided up into sub-topics, which are studied in depth.

Great focus is placed on the importance of developing ideas, giving opinions and reasons, as well as the ability to accurately manipulate a variety of tenses. As each sub-topic is studied, pupils prepare full answers to all the questions in the Conversation Booklet, which forms a major part of the oral examination, as well as providing important writing practice.

Each lesson covers four skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. These four skills are of equal value in the final examination. The mock examination in year 10 allows pupils to experience the demands of a GCSE paper. The results of this exam enables pupils to set targets for year 11, with the aim of improving their grade.

Exchanges

We are very fortunate to have an excellent and very successful exchange with France, Germany and Spain. Quite a number of pupils stay in contact with their exchange partners once the exchange is over, often via e-mail. The exchanges not only allow pupils to improve their linguistic skills but also enable them to learn much more about and experience first hand the culture and traditions of the country they are visiting.

Ofsted praised the MFL Department in the 2005 report:

“Provision in modern foreign languages is excellent”

“Excellent leadership and management and very good teaching result in very high standards and very high achievement in French, German and Spanish”

“The achievement of pupils in all three languages is very good from years 7 to 11”

“Teachers have very good linguistic skills and very good subject knowledge. They also have very high expectations and constantly challenge pupils to give of their best”

“The very good relationships also facilitate very good teaching and learning.”