Created by Jane Driver, Director of Languages at St Neots Learning Partnership, this is an exciting intellectual challenge for year 7s, combining as it does, National Curriculum Maths levels with language skills (French/Spanish/German)
Rationale
Numbers are high frequency language right from the beginning of learning a new language. They're needed to talk about age, birthdays, dates, sizes, measurements, prices, distances, time.. etc. So it's vital to acquire them as early as possible.
Once learnt they can also be used easily and comfortably within target language instructions ('question no.102', 'page 68' etc) and therefore help towards meeting Ofsted Inspection criteria pertaining to use of target language.LinguaMaths is a CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) project with Maths being taught in the target language and as such enhances the learning: "Experience in UK Primary and Secondary Schools, as well as wider research, has shown that students enjoy learning in this way and are more likely to become fluent and confident language users. Importantly, the results achieved show that students do as well or even better in the non-language subject than they would if learning it in the normal way." FLAME, 2013
and click here for a TES article to see why learning Maths in a foreign language boosts MFL grades.
There are 9 tests altogether, corresponding to NC levels and on successful completion pupils can have their achievement recognised with a Routes into Languages certificae.
LinguaMaths can also be used as part of the Languages Challenge
