Spanish (Modern Foreign Language)

At Bannerman Road, we offer a relevant, broad, vibrant, and ambitious MFL curriculum that will inspire and excite our pupils using a wide variety of topics and themes. All pupils will be expected to achieve their full potential by encouraging high expectations and excellent standards in their foreign language learning. At Bannerman Road we learn Spanish and use “Language Angels” as our language scheme.

We want pupils to become curious about the unknown wider world and believe that learning a second language will also offer them the opportunity to explore relationships between language and identity, developing a deeper understanding of other cultures and the world around them with a better awareness of self, others, and cultural differences.

MFL teaching starts in Year 3. However, given the multi-culturalism of our school, multiple different languages are spoken by our pupils and staff from Early Years. This exposure enables pupils to respect and embrace difference, sparking curiosity about learning a new language from an early age.

Our MFL curriculum for Years 3-6 is delivered through focused blocks which each have a progression of substantive and disciplinary knowledge. We want children to have a strong foundation as well as a good grounding of the basics and therefore, pupils are immersed in the language by being taught important vocabulary for each unit and encouraged to communicate their learning in different ways. We aim to enrich their foreign language skills by using carefully sequenced units of learning that build on prior knowledge and will provide pupils with the opportunity to strengthen and deepen their knowledge.

Our curriculum is underpinned by carefully sequenced progressions of knowledge which are focused on practical communication and linked to the National Curriculum attainment targets. The four key language learning skills; listening, speaking, reading, and writing will be taught and all necessary grammar will be covered in an age-appropriate way across KS2.

We want pupils to be resilient, challenged and continue to practice. As a result, pupils will be taught how to look up and research language they are unsure of, and they will have a bank of reference materials to help them with their spoken and written tasks going forward. This bank of reference materials will develop into a reference library to help pupils recall and build on previous knowledge throughout their primary school language learning journey.

Our intention is that children will be working towards becoming life-long language learners. Our aim is that all pupils will develop a genuine interest and positive curiosity about foreign languages, finding them enjoyable and stimulating, so that they will feel willing and able to continue studying languages beyond key stage 2.