Spanish
Introduction to Spanish at Harris Academy Morden
The term curriculum serves as a short hand for the purpose of school, which we believe is to achieve academic success through enabling students to acquire knowledge and develop skills that take them beyond their experience. We apply this key principle to our Languages curriculum:
The apprenticeship of learning a language provides an open road to the world and a vehicle for overcoming educational disadvantage. Through Languages, we promote students’ curiosity and deepen their understanding of different countries’ people, culture, history, literature and arts. We challenge students to consider their own identity and place in the world and to appreciate and empathise with different ways of seeing the world.
We aim to equip students with the confidence, lexicon and grammatical foundations that allow them to express their ideas and opinions, to seek information and to respond to speakers of the language across the skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. By developing students’ linguistic, communicative and intercultural skills, we strive to foster rounded individuals ready for lifelong language learning and entry into a global, more cooperative and more peaceful world. 1
We believe it is a moral duty, beyond the specific requirements of any curriculum, to afford students the opportunity to learn another language and of its associated culture. We feel this is particularly pressing at a time of increasingly apparent polarisation at national and global levels.
- The benefits of learning a language are manifold and very well documented. The LLAS5 has given no less than 700 reasons for studying languages and grouped into 70 different key areas in which languages make a difference. The infographic in Appendix 1 provides a striking and powerful collection of reasons with which we identify. We strive to communicate these reasons to our students both explicitly and implicitly through our curriculum and passionate, enthusiastic teachers.
- As such, we believe “whatever their level of achievement, the vast majority of young people should study a modern foreign language up to the age of 16 and take a GCSE in it.” 2
- Our curriculum aligns with the Aims and Subject Content of the KS3 National Curriculum and GCSE Subject Content in Appendix 2 and 3 respectively.
Our curriculum aligns with the Aims and Subject Content of the KS3 National Curriculum and GCSE Subject Content. 3
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1 Harris Federation Language Consultant Curriculum Intent Statement (2018)
2 Bauckham, I. (2016) Modern Foreign Languages Pedagogy Review Report http://tscouncil.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/MFL-Pedagogy-Review-Report-2.pdf
