French/Spanish
Our Languages curriculum at The Skipton Academy is based on our departmental vision that language learning is a life skill for all, and is underpinned by our School ethos: Belong, Challenge, Inspire. We aim to encourage all students to foster an open mind for a global community, step beyond familiar cultural boundaries and broaden their horizons to develop new ways of seeing the world.
Key Stage Three
At Key Stage Three, students will study either French or Spanish. We prioritise the teaching and extensive recycling of vocabulary chunks using sentence builders, so that students can experience success and produce accurate sentences in the target language from the outset. This pedagogical approach – Extensive Processing Instruction (EPI) developed by Dr Gianfranco Conti – is supported by resources from The Language Gym Trilogy series.
Key principles of the KS3 curriculum:
- Each term covers one big topic of three or four units
- Each unit focuses first on listening and speaking before progressing to reading and writing
- Activities within each unit are designed to routinise structures from the sentence builders through extensive drilling
- Language learning, decoding and phonemes are taught explicitly
- Grammar is learnt both implicitly, through input-flooding and thorough processing, and explicitly, through activities which deliberately direct students’ attention to the target features
- Texts are over 95% comprehensible and flooded with target chunks to avoid cognitive overload
Key Stage Four
At Key Stage Four, our curriculum is designed to build upon the knowledge and skills of the language learnt at Key Stage Three. We follow the Edexcel GCSE specification for first examination in 2026.
Thematic contexts of the KS4 curriculum:
- My personal world
- Lifestyle and wellbeing
- My neighbourhood
- Media and technology
- Studying and my future
- Travel and tourism
