Getting to know the world around us

At Colne Engaine we strongly believe learning languages fosters children’s curiosity about the world, celebrates difference and encourages a spirit on wonder that they will carry with them through to adulthood.

We aim to ensure all KS2 pupils will develop a genuine interest and positive curiosity about foreign languages, predominantly Spanish. Learning a language will offer pupils the opportunity to explore relationships between language and identity, develop a deeper understanding of other cultures and the world around them with a better awareness of self, key individuals and cultural differences.

We use the Language Angels programme and resources to ensure we offer a relevant, broad and vibrant foreign languages curriculum that will inspire and excite our pupils using a wide variety of topics and themes.

Using Language Angels we follow a ‘step-by-step approach’. The three ‘pillars’ of language learning (phonics, grammar and vocabulary) are all weaved into the scheme and, as our children progress through the units and teaching types, previous language is recycled, revisited and consolidated.

Any new language is introduced gradually and becomes more complex and sophisticated as pupils move from Early Language to Intermediate to Progressive units.

The language learning journey starts with us working on nouns and gender, we then move up to phrase level and finally longer passages of text. As pupils move through the three teaching types they increase their knowledge and understanding of the foreign language as more grammar is introduce. Pupils will gradually understand more, say more, understand more of what they read and will also be able to write more. Pupils will learn to both ask and answer questions from the very start.

We have selected our units to ensure we cover a wide-ranging and expanding knowledge of vocabulary, grammar, phonics and pronunciation and these are all built into the lessons.

Phonics: There are four sequential and progressive phonics lessons incorporated into all our long-term planning. These four lessons build up pupils’ phonetic knowledge, moving from the phoneme on its own, to seeing it in high-frequency words and then finally incorporated in context in a longer piece of text. Each year group/teaching type has a particular group of phonemes to focus on

Vocabulary: Essential vocabulary to be covered by the end of primary phase has been summarised on a ‘Core Vocabulary Mat’ – see below. Beyond this, in each lesson pupils are also taught and encouraged to expand their own vocabulary using a dictionary so that they develop and expand their own responses.

Grammar: Grammar is weaved into each unit across all three teaching types. Grammar is addressed both implicitly and explicitly. Implicitly in the early learning units then moving towards a more explicit approach in our intermediate and progressive units.