Modern Foreign Languages

The Crawshaw Languages Department are a passionate and dedicated team of linguists, who work together to instill a love of learning languages and encourage intercultural curiosity in a fun and engaging way. 

A foreign language opens the door to a multitude of career and travel opportunities. Our curriculum strives to give students the foundations in French and German, allowing students to not only enrich their CVs and appear more competitive in the global job market, but also develop the necessary skills to become life-long language learners.  

We provide a challenging and engaging curriculum which teaches grammar, phonics, vocabulary and culture to enable students to listen to and read texts from various sources with a continuously deeper understanding, and to be able to speak and write in the target language about a range of topics with constantly developing linguistic complexity and fluency. We use games, songs, foreign language films and authentic texts to bring the language to life and offer the students further opportunities to explore the arts, literature and culture of the target language countries.  

In addition to this and exemplifying the Red Kite goal of ‘Innovating with technology’, we have also created our own student website: “The Languages Hub”, where students have access to various games, songs and videos to support students in their learning. The department benefits from access to ipads  which we use to support us in learning vocabulary and practising grammar, as well as for cultural research projects and online game websites. In this ever-developing technological world, students are taught vital skills in how to use technology to support their language learning journey as both part of their classwork as well as home learning tasks. 

The Crawshaw MFL department look forward to introducing a range of cultural and linguistic experiences this year such as participating in the Oxford University outreach programme and the Routes into Languages competitions, which encourage all students to use their language creatively and purposefully. We also look forward to bringing back trips to Germany and France in the near future.

In KS3, students study either French or German depending on their band, with 4 hours per fortnight dedicated to this language. At the end of Year 8, students of French can also opt to start German from a complete beginners' level. Students in KS4 have 5 hours per fortnight of lessons, during which we follow the AQA GCSE specification. 

Languages Curriculum Overviews