Modern Foreign Languages

“Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry or savour their songs.”

Nelson Mandela

Modern Languages provide a way of transcending cultural barriers, allowing students to see their world from a different viewpoint. It prompts them to question what is ‘normal’, fosters their curiosity and deepens their understanding of the world as a rich and diverse place filled with different customs, perspectives, history, arts, literature and ways of communicating.

The skill of speaking and thinking simultaneously only develops when students are able to successfully store and retrieve information from their long-term memory. From year seven through to year eleven, out-of-lesson learning, alongside well-planned retrieval in lessons, enables students to frequently access past vocabulary and concepts and this eradicates the need for rote learning or cramming. This allows them to truly become speakers, and writers, of a language.

Whilst the MFL department at Saddleworth wants students to achieve the very best examination results, our Languages curriculum goes beyond what is examinable. It is vital that students have the opportunity to experience as many of the different sides to learning a language as possible. In order to support this, we offer a range of enrichment opportunities both within and outside of lessons. These include poetry, sporting and spelling competitions, opportunities to explore festivals and traditions in other countries, language taster sessions in new languages, visits abroad to the countries where the taught languages are spoken, visiting speakers from universities and the opportunity to mentor and teach younger students.

Focus for Assessments: Speaking, Listening, Reading, Writing, Vocabulary and Grammar

These skills are taught through the lens of three themes:

• Local, national, international and global areas of interest.      
• Identity and Culture.
• Current and future study and employment.