Languages

Languages at Valley Primary School

At Valley Primary School, languages from around the world are valued and celebrated. Whilst Spanish is the language that is taught to pupils from Year 3 to Year 6, we are a diverse community and it is not uncommon to hear children talking in any number of home languages throughout the day. Valley pupils step through the school gates knowing that their knowledge of languages is a useful tool for communication, a way to strengthen and develop their cognitive abilities, and a key to sharing their cultures and experiences.

Intent

The intention of our language teaching at Valley is that all children have the opportunity to learn an additional language through high-quality Spanish lessons. Whether they speak other languages at home or not, all pupils from Year 3 to Year 6 will begin to learn and share a common language, leading to children being able to greet each other, share their interests and eventually have short conversations, even across classes and year groups. Not only will this provide a foundation of skills that will support their language learning in secondary school and beyond, but also provide them with meaningful ways to connect with others, helping them take their initial steps towards becoming global citizens. Lessons will highlight countries and communities that speak Spanish, allowing pupils to see exactly how far and wide their skills can be used, and additional assemblies and curriculum days will shine a spotlight on the achievements of Spanish-speaking people, allowing children to see positive role models and explore professions and goals that they may want to aim for in the future.

Implementation

Valley Primary School uses the Language Angels scheme of work in order to ensure that all teachers and staff feel supported in their teaching of Spanish and that all classes will receive high-quality lessons including meaningful topic and vocabulary, accurate pronunciation and clear progression. Units from the Language Angels website are chosen specifically to meet the needs of our classes and to link with other areas of our curriculum. Each unit will link back to vocabulary and grammar that has been taught in previous units, allowing children to build on their knowledge each half-term and enjoy exploring new ways to use their existing skills.

In order to ensure that language is practised regularly, Spanish is taught to all children in Years 3-6 in short, weekly lessons, although teachers may also lead short recap sessions and games throughout the week. Half-termly topics are split into manageable chunks, but across the topic - and indeed in many individual lessons - children will take part in activities to develop the four key language skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. Children will have the opportunity to repeat and practise new vocabulary and sentence structures as a class and with partners, to play games designed to embed vocabulary, to sing songs to help vocabulary recall and to write sentences. As they move up through the years, children will increase their repertoire of sentences and phrases and will begin to expand sentences and link them in order to form short paragraphs.

Impact

Children’s progress is assessed by teachers throughout the lesson and individual activities can be tailored to children’s varying levels of knowledge and confidence using both the Language Angels website and high-level teaching strategies. Unit assessments are also available for teachers to use each half-term. As children move on to further units they are provided with a wider range of vocabulary, more challenges and more opportunities to link and develop key skills.