King James's School
Languages
The faculty
Staff
Currently the Languages team has a complement of four highly committed, well-qualified language specialists. . The current members of the team are:
|
Louise Peace (Head of Languages) |
Naomi Pinkney (2nd in Languages) |
| Lauren Atkinson | Alex Leyland |
Accommodation and Resources
The Languages area consists of three modern and spacious class rooms in our attractive new block, which opened in 2022. All are equipped with Interactive Whiteboards. The rooms are shared between all languages teaching staff in the department.
The department is very well resourced and we share internally produced lessons across the team. We follow the pedagogy of Dr Gianfranco Conti, using sentence builders and knowledge organisers at the forefront of all our teaching, in combination with traditional teaching methods. Retrieval practice is also widely used in lessons across both key stages.
We supplement these resources with online text books. In French, the main textbooks in Key Stage 3 are Access and Dynamo and Viva 1 to 3 for Spanish. In Key Stage 4 the main course books are Studio for French and Viva for Spanish.
Time Allocation
The school operates a 25-period two weekly timetable, with five 60-minute lessons per day.
Currently, in Years 7-9, students have typically five periods a fortnight. This continues into Years 10-11 with GCSE French and Spanish.
Schemes of Work Key Stage 3
The languages currently taught are French and Spanish. French or Spanish is compulsory at Key Stage 3 and is taught for five one hour lessons over a two week timetable in predominantly mixed ability groups.
At Key Stage 4, students are strongly encouraged to select French and Spanish. We regularly have 50% of our students continuing to study a Language to GCSE.
Achievements
Exam grades at GCSE have been consistently excellent over the last few years achieving some of the best grades across the school. Large numbers of students follow GCSE Languages, typically around 50% of our cohorts.
Extra-Curricular Activities
The Department runs regular revision sessions for Year 11 to help students achieve their potential, held fortnightly after school. We have a successful and popular Language Ambassador programme in Year 10 and we run a weekly online Blooket club for KS3, which is co-ordinated by Language Ambassadors. In Year 9, some students take part in the national GCHQ competition during the Autumn term.
We continue to develop strong links with our feeder primary schools and sixth form colleges to ensure students have a comprehensive learning journey.
The Curriculum
Curriculum Intent
The Languages specific Curriculum Intent can be found here:
Assessment Guidance
The Languages approach to Assessment can be found here:
Learning Journey
The Languages Curriculum Sequences can be found here:
Golden Knowledge Organisers
The school defines 'Golden Knowledge' as being the most important content to Remember and Understand, as it represents the main building blocks of the curriculum.
The Languages 'Golden Knowledge' for each year group can be found here:
Year on a page
The summary of each Year Group's curriculum can be found here:
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