Foreign Language

At PACA our learning journey in French and Spanish involves:

• Developing an understanding and appreciation of Francophone and Hispanic cultures; celebrating differences and identifying similarities.
• Using an understanding of spelling patterns to accurately predict pronunciation.
• Learning grammatical language and using it to identify patterns and rules in the target language.
• Making comparisons and identifying differences and similarities between the target language and English.
• Understanding how to recognise patterns in words (i.e. verb and adverb endings).
• Understanding and applying key grammatical concepts (i.e. tenses, sentence structure, question formation) in order to communicate effectively both in spoken and written form.
• Filtering and extracting information from spoken and written texts.
• Building and increasing vocabulary in both the target language and English to discuss the world we live in i.e. identity, culture, social issues and the environment.
• Supporting literacy; learning how to structure and add detail to written work.
• Expressing personal opinions and beliefs.

You can read more about our modern foreign language curriculum here and view our curriculum maps showing topics covered in each year group in French and Spanish.

Beyond the Classroom

Each year in the Autumn term the MFL team arrange residential trips to either France or Spain for our Year 11 and some of our Y10 students. The most recent was a trip to Barcelona see highlights of the trip here. 
The team are now planning the next trip to Paris in October 2024!

Parental Support

Students will receive one piece of homework per language studied per week. It is hoped that parents will be able to discuss each piece of homework with students, and support their children in completing work to the best of their ability. Use of internet translators to complete homework should be discouraged, as the aim of tasks is to apply knowledge and skills acquired during lessons, but parents are very welcome to encourage good dictionary skills by supplying a pocket bilingual dictionary or directing students to dictionary websites, such as wordreference.com.

You can also see our teachers' open evening presentations below: