Languages

Learning a foreign language is a liberation from insularity and provides an opening to other cultures. An education in languages education will foster pupils’ curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world. Pupils will be able to express their ideas and thoughts in another language and to understand and respond, both in speech and in writing, to speakers of another language. A languages education also enables pupils to communicate for practical purposes, discover new ways of thinking and read literature in the original language. Learning languages equips pupils to study and work in other countries.

The national curriculum for languages aims for all pupils to: –

• understand and respond to spoken and written language from a variety of authentic sources
• speak with increasing confidence, fluency and spontaneity, finding ways of communicating what they want to say, including through discussion and asking questions, and continually improving the accuracy of their pronunciation and intonation
• write at varying length, for different purposes and audiences, using the variety of grammatical structures that they have learnt
• discover and develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the language studied