At St. Dunstan’s, the children learn French from Year 3 to Year 6. The French curriculum has been thoughtfully designed to cumulatively introduce sounds, vocabulary and sentence structures, which support our children to consolidate their prior learning before encountering new content. Speaking, listening, reading and writing are gradually developed so children leave Year 6 understanding how to learn a new language. The ultimate purpose is for children to express their thoughts and respond to its speakers.

Our teaching is centred on the 26 sounds of French and developing accurate pronunciation of these sounds. For example, in the word ‘trois’, the ‘oi’ grapheme represents the sound we know as ‘wa’ and the image of a crying baby is used to illustrate this sound. Once the children have established secure pronunciation of each individual sound, they can blend these into whole words. Modelling and oral rehearsal are used to teach and practise these sounds. The vocabulary we teach enables our children to build common grammatical structures to form sentences, such as ‘I have = J’ai .. and I don’t have = Je n’ai pas…’. Authentic French stories and rhymes are a central part of our teaching to reinforce key sounds and vocabulary in a rich context. As children progress through Key Stage Two, these grammatical structures become increasingly complex, so they can extend and manipulate their sentences using known vocabulary.