“Enjoy and achieve” is the ethos underpinning Modern Foreign Language learning at Castlecroft School. The pupils start school having already acquired at least one language, their mother tongue. They are already language learners and have developed skills unconsciously equipping them with skills they can apply to new languages.

Learning French and German at Castlecroft has several benefits for the pupils:

• They can learn a new language which they can use to communicate and feel a sense of achievement at being able to decode and encode in another language.

• It enables pupils to learn about other cultures and ways of life and reflect on their own culture and way of life, increasing awareness of oneself in the world.

• It challenges pupils to think differently.

They must use their linguistic skills: listening carefully, looking for patterns, recognising patterns, applying rules to new phrases, being aware of facial clues and body language, listening to rhythms of sentences to identify statements and questions, learning new phonological and syntactical rules, being imaginative, suspending their reality and taking risks in a safe and supported environment.

The challenging process of learning a new language develops linguistic awareness and allows pupils to apply this knowledge of how languages work, to reflect on their own knowledge of English. This will improve their understanding of the building blocks of the English language and so learning a second language make pupils better learners of their first language/English.