Cultivating a Love of Language for Life Beyond Prep School | News

By Elizabeth Sieczko BA (Joint Hons), PGCE - Senior Deputy Head at Feltonfleet

In a post-Brexit, technologically advanced and English speaking world, it is easy to see why children may find it difficult to accept that being able to communicate in other languages is relevant and necessary. 

Discussing, laying out and revisiting the ‘why’ is a key element of Feltonfleet pupils’ MFL lessons. This big picture signposting facilitates learning as, quite simply, our pupils understand the point of it all. This brings motivation and the learning cycle of purpose leading to achievement starts to turn.

At Feltonfleet, pupils predominantly learn French and Spanish, but it is arguably unimportant which particular additional language a child learns. The skills that are developed when learning one additional language are easily transferable to other languages. These skills include a pupil being able to successfully reflect on and review their learning to make improvements to their learning methods or to the process they used to complete a task. We teach pupils to see challenge as positive and to understand that what we call ‘brain burn’ is an essential element of any lesson. This aids our pupils to develop resilience when things don’t go according to plan or when they find something particularly tricky, so that failure can be used as an opportunity to positively adjust the direction of their learning journey. 

At Feltonfleet, our pupils are guided to thrive on challenge, staff are highly skilled in adaptive teaching methods and dedicated language classrooms are kitted out with the latest digital technology sitting alongside in-built roleplay areas, depicting a shop, a market stall and even a police station! 

This isn’t as alarming as it sounds. Our MFL curricula are designed around authentic foreign language texts. For example, pupils in Year 3 learn French through La Chenille qui mange des trous, unpicking the language and developing vocabulary banks  around which The Very Hungry Caterpillar is based. By the time the pupils are in the Upper School (Years 7 & 8) they are equipped to tackle Eric a disparu, a play about a boy who goes missing (hence the need for a gendarmerie on site!). Through literature and texts, pupils are exposed to the natural use of complex grammatical structures which they can pick apart, make links with other language structures and use to construct their own phrases. Alongside this, pupils develop robust learning skills so that they can readily recall vocabulary and verb forms. Add to this the option of learning Latin, and the result is pupils who understand how language works, how the elements fit together and how to build sentences.