Modern Foreign Languages at Whitehouse Primary

At Whitehouse Primary School, foreign language learning is a valued part of our curriculum as we are aware of the internationalist future of our children, recognising the significance of learning another language.

Language Learning at Whitehouse Primary School, teaches children to embrace language acquisition as essential to future success and opens up their curiosity of diverse cultures in the world that they live.

Our Modern Foreign Language curriculum, focuses on acquiring knowledge as well as developing linguistic skills. In teaching Spanish, we make links across the curriculum so that our children are able to make connections with countries studied in Geography and History. Alongside linguistic knowledge, we teach children about larger global concepts of language learning such as religion, tradition, culture, community and linguistic nuance.

The teaching of Modern Foreign Languages follows the National Curriculum - taught discretely as part of a broad and balanced curriculum. Emphasis is placed on acquiring vocabulary and language structure to ensure pupils can express themselves in the target language.

The Modern Languages element of our curriculum aims to provide not only the opportunity to learn how to speak and write in Spanish but the chance for our children to develop their awareness of worldwide cultural similarities and differences. We strive to embed the skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing necessary to enable children to use and apply their Spanish learning in a variety of contexts and lay the foundations for future language learning. We aim to raise awareness of our multilingual and multicultural world, and introduce an international dimension to learning.

Children at Whitehouse Primary School begin formal Spanish learning in Key Stage Two, with informal oral learning of salutations, number, months and colours in KS1.