Intent:

We want to equip our students with the knowledge and skills to thrive and success in language learning by:

• Encouraging and inspiring them with quality-first teaching.
• Broadening their awareness of other countries, traditions, and communities.
• Providing opportunities for participation in a broad range of linguistic and cultural educational experiences.
• Encouraging students to be able to use transferable skills: skills that can be utilised in other lessons across the curriculum.
• Enriching students’ experience of Languages by incorporating a diverse range of authentic material such as videos, blogs, and newspaper/magazine articles etc.
• Providing a clear sense of purpose to tasks, making them ‘real’ and relevant to everyday life.
• Encouraging students to take ownership of their own revision materials and strategies at Key Stage 4.

Implementation:

At KS3, each unit of learning is based on one sentence builder and every lesson’s vocabulary comes from the sentence builders.

At KS4, we use a more hybrid approach where we mix sentence builders with GCSE tasks which allow us to practise key strategies for the GCSE exams.

To maximise our students’ progress, we utilise a variety of pedagogical approaches when delivering languages lessons, namely:

• Knowledge retrieval
  • Regular and spaced recycling and retrieval of high frequency vocabulary, verbs and structures across as many modalities as possible supports the storing of knowledge in the long term memory.
• Flipped learning 
  • Flipped Learning puts greater focus on the pre-learning which takes place prior to the lesson so that the lesson can focus on applying the knowledge. Flipped Learning creates opportunities with students’ independent learning before their lesson. It requires careful planning to ensure that the learning/application in the lesson builds on the learning that has taken place prior to the lesson.
• Spaced learning
  • We regularly endeavour to revisit and review vocabulary, grammar and assessment foci across both Key Stages.
• Oracy
  • This lies at the very heart of language-learning and students are encouraged to not only speak in the foreign language but also articulate their learning and thinking behind it.
• Modelling of exam strategy and exemplar answers
  • Having teachers complete answers to tasks whilst talking students through the thought process involved helps to break down the task into more manageable sections. Additionally, this approach helps to build student confidence when facing exam questions.
• Scaffolding
  • This progressively moves students towards greater independence and understanding during the learning process. Like how builders require scaffolding to access new heights, instructional scaffolding helps student navigate exams and accomplish tasks they otherwise might not have been able to.
• Building glossaries
  • Students are encouraged to build their own glossaries of key vocabulary for future retrieval and revision. Frequent reminders from teachers to revisit the glossary vocabulary will help to commit to the long-term memory.
• Use of Technology such as Kahoot, Quizlet, Kerboodle, LanguageNut, etc
  • Technology offers the flexibility to use a combination of tools and methods to help students absorb new information and efficiently learn and enhances the language learning process.

Impact:

We want our students to:

• use language skills, receptively and productively, for communication in the real world, for practical purposes, for their immediate needs, interests and beyond and to express and justify opinions.
• develop their confidence and autonomy to access new and unfamiliar language through the use of decoding skills brought about by the explicit teaching of phonics and sound patterns.
• work towards becoming a fluent and spontaneous speaker of the foreign language.

All students will need access to equipment, textbooks, and Chromebooks to access resources on Google Classroom. Independent learning tasks are set every week on Classcharts to support their studies and reinforce key concepts.

At ALNS, we ensure that all students have the opportunity to learn a foreign language and have access to a different culture to widen their horizon. We are hoping to foster a genuine interest and curiosity in the subject which might lead to a lifelong interest.

KS3
In year 7, students are asked each week to complete two tasks on Languagenut.com and to record their score on their IL tracker at the front of their exercise book.

In year 9, students are asked to copy 20 words per week (provided by AQA) into their IL book. They are tested on these words in the lesson. They also must complete a gap-fill activity on Languagenut.com. Students are expected to record their test and gap-fill scores on their tracker at the front of their book.

KS4

In year 10 and 11, students are asked to copy 20 words per week (provided by AQA) into their IL book. They are tested on these words in the lesson. They must complete a gap-fill activity and a GCSE style question (called Task 3) on Languagenut.com. Students are expected to record their test and gap-fill scores on their tracker at the front of their book.

We offer a trip to Caen in France for our Year 7 students and a trip to Aachen in Germany for our Year 10 students.

We have partner schools in both France and Germany and our KS3 students are corresponding with them.