International Literacy Day – MFL activities
Year 7 – the focus of this lesson will be on punctuation and the grammatical differences between
English and Spanish. Through reading a short text, pupils will discuss the rules for capital letters in
Spanish, the use of commas and decimal points in numbers and the existence of ¡ and ¿ at the start of
exclamatory sentences and questions.
Year 8 – the focus of this lesson will be on the meta-language used in order to succeed in language
learning. Pupils will have a text in Spanish and have to find: nouns, adjectives, definite and indefinite
articles, connectives, time indicators, infinitives and verbs in the present and future tenses. Pupils will
then complete a comprehension activity on the text. Pupils will use a variety of reading strategies,
such as the use of cognates and near-cognates and context to work out meaning. They will be
encouraged to persevere and concentrate fully even when language is unfamiliar and use a bilingual
dictionary to look up new words in the text or questions.
Year 9 – the focus of this lesson will also be on the meta-language used in order to succeed in language
learning. Pupils will have a text in Spanish and have to find: nouns, adjectives, definite and indefinite
articles, connectives, time indicators, infinitives as well as verbs in the present, past and future tenses.
Pupils will then complete a comprehension activity on the text as detailed above.
GCSE – the focus of this lesson will be on understanding the GCSE success criteria to communicate in
sophisticated French and Spanish language. Pupils will read a lengthy text in which they need to
identify: adjectives, connectives, time indicators, justified opinions as well as verbs in the present,
perfect, preterite, imperfect, conditional and future tenses. Pupils will then complete a
comprehension activity on the text as detailed above.
A-level – the focus of this lesson will be on understanding the A-level success criteria to communicate
in sophisticated Spanish. Students will read an authentic text in which they need to identify: verbs in
the present, perfect, preterite, imperfect, pluperfect, conditional and future tenses and the
subjunctive mood. Students will then complete a comprehension activity on the text as detailed above
and write a summary of the text in their own words.