Modern Foreign Languages – Spanish
Our Vision
At The Wren we are committed to ensuring that we can give the best possible start to our students once they have left the school. Studying a modern foreign language broadens students’ thinking and enhances their cultural awareness as well as equipping them with valuable communication skills that help prepare them for a globalised world. It has never been more important to be able to communicate with a range of people from different backgrounds and cultures and studying MFL provides an excellent foundation for not only language learning but also personal development.
At The Wren, we will develop linguist skills through focus to:
- Enrichment
- Understanding
- Confidence
Enrichment:
At The Wren, our focus is on the enrichment that languages provide. Most people alive today speak multiple languages, and this makes them who they are. Nelson Mandela famously said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.” Ask someone how they would feel if they suddenly became monolingual and they might say that they would feel less of a human. A multilingual person can be multiple people, inhabiting multiple worlds. The linguist Nick Evans explains that we study other languages because we cannot live enough lives.
Understanding:
In an increasingly globalised world, we want our students to foster a deeper understanding of the diversity of world cultures, and of how they are reflected in our own community in order to promote greater tolerance, empathy, and acceptance of others. Our students will leave school with a greater awareness of the differences and similarities between their own culture and other world cultures.
Confidence:
Through language learning, we provide our students with life-skills that build confidence by instilling the resilience of language-learning strategies that provide them with. Learning a language forces students to move out of their comfort zone. We support students to find the confidence to leave their comfort zone and embrace a “have-a-go” mentality where mistakes are encouraged as part of the process to learning. Ultimately, learning a language has been shown to improve memory, problem-solving and critical-thinking skills, enhance concentration, all of these life skills that will serve our students well in education and beyond.