French

• You enjoy communicating with others.
• You want to learn more about other cultures, including films, TV and literature.
• You might like to work abroad in the future.
• You wish to increase your employability: language specialists usually get preference over other candidates of identical ability who don’t have a language.
• Whatever you decide to do as a career, it is highly likely that you will one day find yourself working for a multinational company or for a firm with connections abroad: in France, Canada, Africa or Switzerland.
• The demand by companies for executives, management, scientists and sales people to be multilingual is ever increasing. Employers say they want people with skills such as engineering, law, chemistry, etc, who can also speak a foreign language.

You will develop language skills in a wide variety of ways, making full use of our two Multi-Media Language Labs and drawing on a range of sources from course books to the Internet. In class you will carry out a lot of pair and group work designed to build up your communicative skills. We have a range of interactive exercises including vocabulary learning and listening work. Each week, in addition to mainstream lessons, you will have contact with a native speaker through small group conversation sessions. We ‘bridge the gap’ from GCSE to A level with considerable study skills support, and by Year 13 learners are able, for example, to write confident summaries of news items in lunchtime workshop sessions. We run trips and visits both within the UK and to France. Learners can also undertake a work experience placement in France via Blue Stamp Travel. This is a post-GCSE course.