Intent
At St Joseph’s, we believe that learning a foreign language is a necessary part of being a member of a multi-cultural society. A high-quality languages curriculum fosters children’s curiosity and deepens their understanding of the world. The teaching should enable children to express their ideas and thoughts in another language and to explore cultures and languages of foreign countries.
It should also provide opportunities for them to communicate for practical purposes, learn new ways of thinking and explore literature in the original language.
We believe that early acquisition of a foreign language facilitates the learning of other foreign languages later in life, and should motivate and enthuse children to continue to study a foreign language at secondary school.
Implementation
Portugues: All classes from EYFS to Year 6 benefit from a native Portuguese Teacher who teaches each class for thirty minutes per week. Foreign language lessons are underpinned through interactive and engaging teaching tools such as games, role play, action songs and story telling.
This supports vocabulary development, reading, writing, speaking and listening skills.
Italian: We have a specialist Italian teacher who visits us every week from the Italian Embassy to teach an Italian lesson to all the children in EYFS and KS1. The children are introduced to language learning through songs, games and stories. In working collaboratively with the Italian Embassy, our aim is to establish a positive language learning ethos from a young age.
Latin: We subscribe to the Latin Programme to embed high-quality, inventive Latin lessons into the curriculum across Key Stage 2.
The programme is built to support English literacy to ensure that our pupils have the strongest possible understanding of English grammar, beginning with nouns and verbs, before moving on to Latin.
The lessons encourage creativity in the classroom and provide opportunities to explore the many ways the ancient Romans continue to influence our modern world.
Impact
Through learning other foreign languages, children at St. Joseph’s will learn how language skills can be applied to a range of languages. They will be aware that language has structure, and that the structure differs from one language to another. They will develop their language through development of the four key skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing. and will enrich their language learning by developing an understanding of culture.
The core values applied through acquiring a new language are promoting self-esteem and self-reliance, which is particularly important with those students who struggle at school. Latin, in particular, boosts cognitive processes essential for maths, science, and engineering, and has been said to cultivate such mental processes as alertness, attention to detail, memory, logic, and critical reasoning.
Curriculum Overviews