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Spanish

As Spanish follows on very naturally from French, pupils can enjoy this second foreign language from Year 7.

Teaching methods are similar to those used in French and the staff explore every opportunity to enable pupils to mix with native speakers and to develop their knowledge of Spanish culture and people.

Spanish is valuable to our children in Years 7 and 8 because it gives them the opportunity to:

  • Become interested, even fascinated, by foreign languages, their speakers and culture, and to enjoy the feelings it can bring.
  • Form and express opinions in the target language and thus develop their moral and ethical awareness.
  • Explore different social conventions, such as forms of address, as well as the ability to communicate and co-operate with speakers of foreign languages in an appropriate way.
  • Gain new insights into differences in the way people live and opportunities to relate these to their own lifestyle and experience by increasing their awareness of other cultures.
  • Use Spanish as the principle means of communication within the classroom and beyond it, where opportunities exist.
  • Develop their knowledge with growing confidence and competence to understand what they hear and read and express themselves in speech and writing
  • Develop their general learning skills

We aim to teach in a way that provides opportunities for pupils to develop the key skills of:

  • Communication: including listening, speaking, reading and writing in the target language.
  • Acquiring knowledge and understanding of the target language.
  • Seeing how language ‘works’ and finding links between languages.
  • Communicating information in many different ways for many different purposes: audio, video, ICT, internet.
  • Working with others in pairs, small groups as well as a whole class.
  • Improving and developing their own language and performance by rehearsing and redrafting work as well as memorising, dealing with the unpredictable and using reference material.
  • Problem-solving by adapting their knowledge for specific purposes.
  • Language-learning so that they become increasingly independent learners and users of Spanish by forming a sound basis for further study.