Modern Foreign Languages

Learning a foreign language is a crucial part of a child’s academic and social development, enabling them to become more knowledgeable about the world in which they live, and to develop their skills and confidence to participate in an  increasingly global society. Learning a language provides students with academic and cultural capital that will enable them to be well educated citizens. Many young people have not had exposure to people from other cultures, and many have not travelled abroad. Sometimes as a result of the context in which children grow up, they have a lack of understanding of foreign languages, cultures and practices which can form a barrier to experiencing new cultures and making the most of opportunities around the world, or within their own community. Learning a language is often the first step in developing a more open-minded attitude to the world, recognising that people live differently in other countries, and that this difference can be positive.

At Gawthorpe, our MFL teaching ensures children can:

  • understand and respond to spoken and written language from a variety of authentic sources
  • speak with increasing confidence, fluency and spontaneity, finding ways of communicating what they want to say, including through discussion and asking questions, and 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.