Introduction
The Modern Languages Faculty offers French and Spanish across the 11-18 curriculum. Both subject areas work closely together to form a diverse, friendly and cohesive team dedicated to sharing resources and expertise with the shared goal of constantly improving the quality of teaching on offer. The MFL team has always had an excellent reputation of supporting newly qualified teachers and regularly mentors Sussex or Brighton University trainees who are looking to qualify in the profession.
Curriculum Intent
Languages equip language learners with the confidence, skills and cultural understanding to engage in meaningful experiences with people from other cultures, forging ambitious, confident and compassionate learners who want to engage to harness positive and meaningful relationships both from and beyond their own culture. The curriculum aims to stimulate interest in language learning, develop thinking skills and build the bricks of listening, speaking, reading and writing for future language learning, opening doors for students to study, work and live abroad.
The sequencing of learning over KS3 and KS4 languages curriculum should enable learners to be introduced to and then re-visit key, core linguistic and grammatical concepts at regular intervals. The curriculum allows for this understanding to be re-visited at a later date, allowing learners to retrieve knowledge and apply to other parts of the curriculum.
Students will be expected to develop listening skills in order to target language conversations; to infer meaning from longer exchanges. Their spoken skills will enable them to express and justify opinions and manipulate grammar to use a variety of tenses, extending ideas using complex structures. Reading skills will equally developed to recognise familiar and less familiar vocabulary across a range of texts including literary authentic texts and to translate from the target language into English. Language learners will be expected to write coherently for different purposes with the specific intention of describing, narrating, expressing and justifying opinions and discussing past and future intentions. They will have the skills to translate English into the target language. All skills and subject knowledge acquisition is built up cumulatively thus subject knowledge is built up over time, retrieval strategies are deployed which require students to evidence recall of prior learning.
Facilities
We are a well-resourced department, using up to date course books at KS3 and KS4 and resources are often tailor made for groups to keep subject content relevant and motivating. At KS5 students are given the flexibility to choose some areas of study, supported by staff. Every MFL classroom is equipped with an IWB.
Enrichment
The MFL Faculty offers a range of clubs to enrich and support the learning of language students. French and Spanish clubs are offered at least once a week which seek to offer independence, extension, revision and intervention in order to improve student outcomes particularly at exam level.
Revision
All information and resources needed for revision are available on the subject pages of Firefly: Click Here: http://heathfieldcc.fireflycloud.net/browse-resources/subjects