At Sheerness West Federation we have chosen to teach Japanese as our main language. There are many benefits arising from this decision: Japan is one of the top three investors in the UK and supports language and cultural exchanges throughout all stages of education; personal development through broadening cultural awareness; enhanced linguistic understanding through comparison between languages.

The benefits are best illustrated by the JF Standard Tree with particular focus on the roots:

The expectations are that children will be within the A2 range by the time they leave in Year 6.

With this mind our curriculum is based on CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) to increase retention and transferable understanding of linguistic concepts. As language is taught and understood best in context we aim to teach through other subjects generating enhanced neural links for long term recall.

Aims:

• Understand and respond to spoken and written language from a variety of authentic sources
• Speak with increasing confidence, fluency and spontaneity, finding ways of communicating what they want to say, including through discussion and asking questions, and continually improving the accuracy of their pronunciation and intonation
• Can write at varying length, for different purposes and audiences, using the variety of grammatical structures that they have learnt
• Discover and develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the language studied.

During Key stage 2 children are taught to:

• Listen attentively to spoken language and show understanding by joining in and responding
• Explore the patterns and sounds of language through songs and rhymes and link the spelling, sound and meaning of words
• Engage in conversations; ask and answer questions; express opinions and respond to those of others; seek clarification and help
• Speak in sentences, using familiar vocabulary, phrases and basic language structures
• Develop accurate pronunciation and intonation so that others understand when they are reading aloud or using familiar words and phrases
• Present ideas and information orally to a range of audiences
• Read carefully and show understanding of words, phrases and simple writing
• Appreciate stories, songs, and poems in the language
• Broaden their vocabulary and develop their ability to understand new words that are introduced into familiar written material, including through using a dictionary
• Write phrases from memory, and adapt these to create new sentences, to express ideas clearly
• Describe people, places, things and actions orally and in writing
• Understand basic grammar appropriate to the language being studied, including (the conjugation of high-frequency verbs; key features and patterns of the language; how to apply these, for instance, to build sentences; and how these differ from or are similar to English.
• Understand the purposes for which the scripts Hiragana, Katakana, Romaji and Kanji are used.