Monday, March 24, 2025 | Uncategorized

With teaching of the new Modern Foreign Languages curriculum well underway, it is important to recognise the biggest changes to the curriculum. It boils down to a MUCH bigger emphasis on phonics and pronunciation, which some argue is the only thing Google Translate can't do properly for you if you're abroad and don't speak the language. In teaching children how to pronounce words in an understandable way, instead of rewarding them for throwing in a random use of the subjunctive for no reason at all, we may well be helping them build confidence to actually speak the language. It's not a perfect system, but I am optimistic that some of these changes could be used to boost confidence and therefore interest in MFL. 

Here are the biggest changes to the new MFL curriculum in England: 

Read-aloud:

Part of the Speaking Exam, this task requires students to read aloud a short text and undertake a short, unprepared Q&A relating to the text. In the read aloud task itself, students will be assessed on their pronunciation and in the short interaction that follows students will be assessed on their communication.

I'm curious to see how Dyslexic students will be supported with this, as this isn't a skill that's insisted on even in GCSE English. 

Dictation:

Part of the Listening Exam, students will be assessed on their ability to transcribe spoken French into written French. This is something we have already been doing, albeit under a different name. When we ask students to listen to a recording and answer questions about it in French, that often is a case of transcribing what they've heard. This is a great way to test if students can break down sentences into separate words, and identify specific phonemes. 

But the change here is that they will be rewarded for their accuracy of spelling. The Listening paper has never marked on spelling before, it was entirely about understanding. Again I am VERY curious to see how Dyslexic students will be supported with handwritten spelling tasks. What purpose this skill has in an age of spellcheck and AI, I do not know. 

No more comprehension questions in French:

It was short-lived and it clearly didn't work out, so questions in French have been scrapped from the Reading and Listening papers. This is going to be great news for students who struggle with French's word order in questions! It would have been a nice challenge to keep a few of them in for the highest achievers, but it was certainly unrealistic to have so many. 

No more literary texts:

Another short-lived decision in the previous curriculum was to expect students to understand random extracts from literally any French literature, including rather archaic texts with little context. Quelle surprise this decision was reversed.

AQA and Edexcel will be publishing lots more resources in the months to come, as they finalise new specimen papers, textbooks and so on. 

If you need a guide to get you through it, shoot me a message :)