French
“If you speak to a man in a language he understands, you speak to his head. If you speak to him in his language, you speak to his heart.”
Nelson Mandela
At Hordle Walhampton School we believe that learning a foreign language provides an opportunity for children to develop a lifelong skill which enables them to broaden their intellectual horizons and enrich their cultural awareness.
Here, there is a real sense of the importance of valuing different cultures and of learning their languages. This emanates from the fact that, as we are fortunate to have children and staff who have lived and worked abroad, a variety of different languages are represented within the school.
European Day of Languages
CILT [The National Centre for Languages] recently identified 700 reasons for learning a language. These ranged from the more obvious in terms of enhanced job opportunities, to the more subtle, such as that expressed so eloquently in the above quote. As there are between 6000 and 7000 languages spoken in the world, we hope to inspire an enthusiasm for learning languages which will lead children to see language learning as a means of making sense of and communicating effectively with the world around them.
HOW DO WE SET ABOUT ACHIEVING THESE AIMS?
By starting young! Young children are fascinated by new sounds and new language and are not afraid of trying to reproduce them. Nor are they put off by hearing language that they do not understand: this does after all happen to them quite frequently in English. The Pre-Prep is, therefore, the perfect place to start learning a language. Here they start learning the basic skills of Listening and Speaking in a Foreign Language and most particularly, through exposure to games, rhymes and songs, they practise the very important skill of extracting what they need to know from a body of unknown language.
As children progress through the school, the number of lessons increases from two per week to five per week in Year Eight. In Years Two and Three they are taught by their class teachers and from then onwards they are taught by a subject specialist. Gradually the emphasis will move from Speaking and Listening, to a greater emphasis on Reading and Writing. This is to accommodate the rigorous demands of the Common Entrance and Scholarship examinations in which French has a very impressive track record.
At all times, however, COMMUNICATION is at the centre of our approach. In our languages lessons children might be acting out a short conversation, giving a presentation, using an interactive website, learning a new tense, drawing a poster to explain a grammatical point , designing a brochure, doing a vocabulary test, creating a PowerPoint, listening to authentic recordings, conducting a survey, playing vocabulary games, singing songs, talking about music or working with puppets.
Activities such as these are created in which children are given the language to learn and then use independently. They are given the opportunity to explore new language collaboratively and then show what they have learned through simple conversations, role plays and short performances. Above all, children are encouraged to pursue an active engagement in their learning and are invited to learn in a happy, non-threatening environment. In doing, so they develop self confidence as well as expertise in the language.
As a department we are constantly looking for ways to show the children the relevance of what they are doing and to bring the subject to life. We recently celebrated European Languages Day in which every child dressed up to represent a country of his or her choice. During the day they were given taster sessions in a number of different languages including German, Spanish and Russian. These sessions were offered by a number of staff in addition to the Languages Department and stand as testimony to the interest and expertise in language learning in school.
Mr Whately-Smith on European Day of Languages
These taster sessions are followed through in Year Eight when children who have finished their examinations are offered the opportunity to learn German. Here they see that the skills they have acquired in learning French and, indeed, Latin can be employed to learn other languages. We hope that this will encourage them to think positively about tackling other languages as they progress through their school career.
We are keen, too, to impress upon the children the need for them to take charge of their learning and to learn independently. We talk to the children about how they should learn, as well as delivering the content of the examination syllabus.
Below are a number of particularly useful websites recommended not just for our Common Entrance and Scholarship children, but hopefully also for others in younger years to enjoy.
Recommended websites
Your child will be given his or her own username and password to access this site which offers material suitable for absolute beginners to GCSE and beyond.
This website can be accessed freely and provides practice material for all areas of the Common Entrance Examination. It caters for all levels from the very basic to advanced grammar and vocabulary.
· www.bbc.co.uk/languages/french
1. French steps – 6 chapters covering Common Entrance topics
2. Ma France -24 chapters covering Common Entrance topics