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Inspection report 2010
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Modern Languages
What will your child study?
All pupils study French in Year 7. There is also a Global Studies programme, which covers aspects of language and culture in Portuguese, Russian and Japanese.
In Year 8 all pupils continue to study French, and they will also take up either German or Spanish.
There are also two very popular weekly after-school Mandarin Chinese classes for beginners and continuers, run by a native speaker. Some pupils opt to take the Asset Languages qualification.
How will they be assessed?
Throughout the Lower School pupils have regular vocabulary tests, termly tests and a final examination in the Summer Term. In addition, short writing tasks are set as homework or in class to assess the standard of written work.
Global studies
All Year 7 pupils follow an introductory course in Russian, Japanese and Portuguese, spending a term on each. There are four lessons per fortnightly cycle; no homework is set and there is no end of year examination of the course.
The aims of the course are to promote awareness of global cultures and to stimulate a love of learning languages: Global Studies forms part of our commitment to prepare Perse pupils for life in a cosmopolitan world by extending our language provision, and we are fortunate to have within the Modern Languages Department specialist teachers of a wide range of languages. Pupils may have the opportunity to continue their study of these languages into Year 8 in lunchtime or after-school sessions, subject to there being sufficient demand.
Pupils follow the “BBC Talk…” course, covering the following topics:
- Greetings and introductions
- Numbers up to 100
- Family members
- Ordering drinks in a café
- Eating out and ordering in a restaurant
- Understanding prices
- Asking for items in a shop/market
- Writing system
Pupils also learn something of the people and culture of the countries in which these languages are spoken, and the kinds of topics covered are:
- Information on everyday life
- A brief overview of the history and geography
- Famous people
- Major cities and tourist centres
- Food and cookery (to include a tasting session of national delicacies)
- Music and culture
All pupils will prepare and perform a song in Russian, Japanese or Portuguese at the Lower School Arts Festival concert in November.
There will be no formal teaching or detailed explanation of the grammar, except for a discussion of the general grammatical characteristics of each language (e.g. gender, forms of address, use or absence of articles etc). Pupils will also learn how each language fits into the system of world languages and will be encouraged to identify similarities with and differences from the languages they already know.
