French
Curriculum Intent
The MFL department aims to support students to understand life and culture in French-speaking countries to encourage receptiveness and adaptability to new experiences. We aim to develop confident language learners who are resilient and able to communicate effectively and confidently in French, building skills in listening, speaking, reading and listening. We endeavour to make learning French enjoyable and meaningful, providing students with a variety of language learning opportunities. We ensure that students have a sound understanding of oral communication skills as well as access to enriching reading and listening materials in order to progress readily to the next stage of their learning. We aim to develop independent learners by ensuring that learning in the classroom is enhanced through self-study.
Curriculum Outline
Year 7 Curriculum
Cycle 1: Students are able to ask and answer questions about themselves, their name, age and birthday.
Cycle 2: Students are able to talk about what they like and dislike doing in their free time and provide justified opinions about these things, including how often they do these things.
Cycle 3: Students are able to describe the school subjects they like and dislike, including a second verb tense, the past tense, to describe something they’ve done in the past.
Year 8 Curriculum
Cycle 1: Students are able to talk about their relationships with friends and family, providing justified opinions. Pupils will revisit describing themselves and layer on new material so they can speak and write about themselves confidently.
Cycle 2: Similarly to year 7 in their cycle three, students will learn to be able to describe the school subjects they like and dislike, including a second verb tense, the past tense, to describe something they’ve done in the past.
Cycle 3: Students will be able to describe and give justified opinions about where they live and be able to recognise and be able to use some examples of the imperfect tense to describe where they used to live. They will also use the conditional tense to describe their dream home.
Have a look at the video below, for more information on the Year 7 and 8 French curriculum.
Year 7 & 8 French Curriculum Overview
Year 9 Curriculum
Cycle 1: Students are able to talk about which food and drinks they like and dislike, providing justified opinions. Pupils will revisit time frames and adjectival endings and learn about the partitive articles du, de la, des.
Cycle 2: Students are able to discuss where they live, what is in their neighbourhood and what one can do there, as well as include increasingly sophisticated constructions to describe their opinions about this.
Cycle 3: Students are able to describe a typical day in the past, present and future, bringing together the wide variety of linguistic structures and tenses that they have learnt over the course of Key Stage 3. Have a look at the video below for more information on the Year 9 French Curriculum.
Year 10 Curriculum
At GCSE level, students will cover a range of topics that build upon those learnt in Years 7, 8 and 9, whilst continuing to develop their skills in the 5 key areas: reading, writing, speaking, listening and translation. The curriculum is also designed to be culturally rich, to ensure a deeper understanding of life in the Francophone countries, as well as encourage students to debate the fors and against of controversial issues.
These are the topics taught at GCSE, the first 5 of which are covered during Year 10.
- Unit 1: Family and relationships
- Unit 2: Technology
- Unit 3: Free Time and Leisure
- Unit 4: Customs and Festivals
- Unit 5: Home and Region
- Unit 6: Social Issues such as a healthy lifestyle
- Unit 7: Global Issues such as the environment
- Unit 8: Holidays, Travel and Tourism
- Units 9 – 12: School, school rules, future studies and the world of work
Year 11 Curriculum
Students cover the remaining units whilst also incorporating key exam skills in preparation for the speaking exam just after Easter and the reading, writing and listening exams at the end of Year 11. They will continue developing their ability to manipulate grammatical structures and communicate with confidence when speaking, listening, reading and writing, across all the units listed above.