SPANISH

At St Patrick’s we teach Spanish to provide our children with an opportunity to learn about other cultures and develop an inclusive school community as the children learn from the same starting points.

 We have fluent Spanish speakers who come to teach the children in Key Stage 2.

Intent

At St Patrick’s Primary School, we offer a relevant and ambitious foreign languages curriculum that inspires and excites our pupils using a wide variety of themes. Our curriculum focuses on the three main building blocks of learning a new language (phonics, vocabulary and grammar). It is our intention to ensure that when our children move to KS3, they will speak with increasing confidence, fluency and spontaneity, finding ways of communicating what they want to say through discussion and asking questions. The children will have the opportunity to continually improve the accuracy of their pronunciation and intonation. Our aim is that children will develop a genuine interest and positive curiosity about foreign languages, finding them enjoyable and stimulating. Children should foster a love of languages.

Implementation

We teach Spanish as our Modern Foreign Language in KS2. It is taught whole-class weekly by a Spanish specialist using the scheme ‘Lingotot’. Each lesson is split into phonics, vocabulary and grammar, enabling children to build on prior learning. The phonics of the language being studied focuses on how children pronounce sounds and how these are represented in writing. This will enable the children to ‘do more with less’. Children are given an opportunity to develop listening, reading, speaking, and writing skills simultaneously; each lesson will cover these four skills equally. Substansive and disciplinary knowledge are explicitly taught and blended in teaching and planning as both are necessary for progress in learning. Substantive knowledge focuses on the key vocabulary required for the topic. The disciplinary knowledge provides the linguistic skills necessary for children to use their substantive knowledge effectively. Children will develop an understanding of grammar and phonics as part of the disciplinary knowledge they need to become independent language learners.

Impact

Through the high quality first teaching of Spanish taking place we will see the impact of the subject in the following ways: 

• Children will develop their language and communication through development of the four key skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing.
• Children will enrich their language learning by developing an understanding of the Spanish culture.
• Children will successfully be able to transfer the skills learnt in Spanish to KS3 language lessons.
• Children will be able write at varying length, for different purposes and audiences, using the variety of grammatical structures that they have learnt.