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Laurel Avenue Community Primary School

Modern Foreign Languages

Curriculum Intent

The teaching of Modern Foreign Languages at Laurel Avenue Community Primary, is designed to aid teachers to help pupils build an Modern Foreign Language schema within their long-term memories. Rather than memorising isolated facts, building a strong Modern Foreign Language schema enables pupils to organise knowledge in a meaningful way.

​As a school we map
​• Breadth of study - the topics the pupils will study
• Threshold concepts - the big ideas in Modern Foreign Languages that pupils will explore through every topic (read fluently, write imaginatively, speak confidently and understand the culture of the countries in which the language is spoken).
• Milestones - the goals that pupils should reach to show they are meeting the expectations of the curriculum.
 
Milestones are the goals that pupils are aiming for; through developing a strong schema based on knowledge, vocabulary and tasks pupils progress through the milestones.
 
Pupils with SEND are given full access to the Modern Foreign Languages curriculum. Teachers use a range of strategies to enable all pupils to become successful within Modern Foreign Language sessions including:
• Word mats, templates and additional resources where appropriate
• Additional adult support from teacher or teaching assistant

Curriculm Implementation

Our curriculum design is based on evidence from cognitive science; three main principles underpin it:
• Learning is most effective with spaced repetition.
• Interleaving helps pupils to discriminate between topics and aids long-term retention.
• Retrieval of previously learned content is frequent and regular, which increases both storage and retrieval strength.
 
In addition to the three principles, we also understand that learning is invisible in the short term and that sustained mastery takes time.
Our content is subject specific. We make intra-curricular links to strengthen schema.
Continuous provision, in the form of daily routines, replaces the teaching of some aspects of the curriculum and, in other cases, provides retrieval practice for previously learned content.

Curriculum Impact

Formative Assessment
Pre-unit diagnostic assessment.
Verbal Feedback – the vast majority of feedback is in conversation with the pupil, allowing misconceptions to be spotted and effectively addressed at an early stage.
 
Summative Assessment
End of unit assessment - assessed against Key Stage Milestones.

Our curriculum distinguishes between subject topics and threshold concepts.

Subject topics are the specific aspects of subjects that are studied. Threshold concepts tie together the subject topics into meaningful schema. The same concepts are explored in a wide breadth of topics. Through this ‘forwards-and-backwards engineering’ of the curriculum, pupils return to the same concepts over and over, and gradually build understanding of them.

Each Threshold Concept is explored within different contexts so that it has tangibility and meaning. Breadth of contexts ensures that pupils gain relevant knowledge and can transfer this knowledge.

MFL Overview

Subject Topics

Long Term Curriculum Map KS1

Long Term Curriculum Map LKS2

Long Term Curriculum Map UKS2

Knowledge Progression: Milestones

KS1: Milestone 1

Lower KS2 : Milestone 2

Upper KS2: Milestone 3

Vocabulary Progression

MFL Policy

Curriculum Drivers
 
 

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