Implementation

Children are introduced to Spanish from Year 3 and receive a weekly 30-minute lesson, delivered by a specialist teacher, throughout their time in KS2. Class teachers provide pupils with short, regular opportunities to reinforce lesson content between sessions. This enables the children to develop early language acquisition skills that facilitate their understanding of the patterns of language and how these compare to the English language.

• Each unit of study builds gradually with pupils developing their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills incrementally to achieve the end of unit goals. Longer term, these end of unit goals are part of the clearly defined steps which build towards the end of key stage objectives.
• Children are taught to listen attentively to spoken language and respond, joining in with songs, rhymes and games.
• Pupils move from rehearsed answers to combining vocabulary and grammar to communicate their own messages.
• There are frequent opportunities built in to planning for pupils to revise and revisit previously learned language so that they can recall it and apply it in other contexts.
• A variety of colourful, relevant and high-quality physical and digital resources is used to aid with motivation and memorisation.
• Our specialist language teacher has an almost exclusive use of the foreign language during lessons. Pupils are immersed in appropriate target language as much as possible, with English used as necessary to ensure comprehension.
• Opportunities are provided in each lesson for pupils to use and practise what they have learned.
• Language games are planned into lessons to enhance motivation, contextualise learning and heighten enjoyment
• Children are taught to listen attentively to spoken language and respond, through songs and rhymes and stories.
• There is a strong focus on grammatical structures and phonology.
• Children have plenty of opportunities to practise their spoken language during paired-work and group discussion.
• Use of authentic materials
• Use of ICT where relevant and appropriate – for example commercially produced software, teacher produced resources, internet research and use of the interactive whiteboard.
• Children produce one piece of writing each half term, to reinforce learning.