MFL French
Why we study French at HASN
Learning French enables students to express their ideas and thoughts in French and to understand and respond to French speakers, both in speech and in writing. Students will have opportunities to communicate for practical purposes and read great literature from the French-speaking world. Vast and culturally diverse, enriched by many great poets, writers, and philosophers from as far away as Asia, the Caribbean islands and Africa, the French language and literature will certainly equip students to study and work in many countries and international organisations across the world.
What studying French is like at HASN
At HASN, skills and topics in French are revisited throughout the learning journey, but the work becomes progressively more challenging each year to allow for a greater depth of knowledge and understanding. Grammatical concepts are gradually introduced in year 7 and developed throughout the following years. For example, in KS3, students will learn the concept of gender agreement in reference to nouns and regular adjectives and tenses. This is crucial in productive skills (such as writing and speaking) by making simple or longer coordinated sentences agreeing the noun and the adjective and by using the correct tense to narrate a past, present or future event.
These concepts are revisited in greater depth in KS4 when students learn irregular adjectives and their declensions, as well as the nuances and variations within a particular tense. Students at KS4 write longer pieces of work or depict verbally an event based on the GCSE topics provided by the exam board, with increasing grammatical accuracy and detail. In KS5, students produce a film-based or novel-based essay in which they will have to show a constant use of all the grammatical concepts taught since KS3.
