MFL (Modern Foreign Languages)

Our departmental vision is to promote life-long language learning, by promoting confidence and resilience, enabling all students to experience success in foreign languages. Students are taught carefully tailored lessons in mixed-ability groups. Hands-down targeted questioning, mini-whiteboards, high expectations and regular praise are key to our success.

We use sentence builder booklets to define and scaffold the core language of our curriculum: understanding, asking for, and giving information, expressing and justifying reasons, and mastery of the present, future and past time frames. An equal emphasis on all four modalities ensures that students not only understand when listening and reading but also communicate effectively when speaking and writing.

By linking our curriculum to target-language countries, we broaden horizons and inspire the ambition to travel or work abroad. Students empathise with those living in other communities as we explore customs and cultures and our letter exchange with students in Germany is an intrinsic part of our KS4 offering.

Summative assessment points for all modalities take place at least once a year. We look at all classwork, class contributions and independent learning tasks to determine whether a child is towards, at, or above BGS standard at each stage of their learning journey.