{"id":1860,"date":"2025-05-20T13:34:54","date_gmt":"2025-05-20T12:34:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/progression-primary-languages\/?p=1860"},"modified":"2026-03-24T11:17:04","modified_gmt":"2026-03-24T11:17:04","slug":"do-children-make-progress-in-primary-languages-new-insights-from-french-german-and-spanish-classrooms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/progression-primary-languages\/do-children-make-progress-in-primary-languages-new-insights-from-french-german-and-spanish-classrooms\/","title":{"rendered":"Do Children Make Progress in Primary Languages? New Insights from French, German and Spanish Classrooms\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

Exploring how vocabulary, phonics, and grammar develop in KS2 \u2014 and whether having a specialist teacher makes a difference.<\/em><\/p>\n

The National Curriculum Programme of Study for Languages<\/a> at Key Stage 2 (Years 3 to 6, ages 7 to 11) states that language teaching in primary school \u201cshould focus on enabling pupils to make substantial progress<\/strong> in one language\u201d. But how much progress do children really make when learning a language in primary school? And what do children know in the language they are learning by the time they leave primary school?<\/p>\n

This is what we have been investigating in the Progression in Primary Languages (PiPL) project \u2013 what progress looks like over the four years of learning a language at primary school and what factors can have an impact on language learning in this context (see our first blog post<\/a> to learn more about the wider study).<\/p>\n

Here we take a look at our preliminary findings in relation to the learning of vocabulary, phonics, and grammar.<\/p>\n

How we are measuring vocabulary, phonics, and grammar learning<\/strong><\/h2>\n

We are working with 17 primary schools and more than 1800 pupils across England. Eight of the participating primary schools teach French, seven of the schools teach Spanish and two teach German. Importantly, all of the schools offer between 45-60 minutes of language teaching per week, following a structured scheme of work.<\/p>\n

Each year, participating children complete a set of activities in French, German or Spanish, so that we can look at what they know and can do in the language they are learning.<\/p>\n

Vocabulary<\/h3>\n

For vocabulary<\/strong>, we created a multiple-choice activity, where children see and hear a word in French, German or Spanish and have to choose what the word means from four options:<\/p>\n

The activity has 40 items (including nouns, verbs and adjectives). To decide which words to test, we created a list of the words included in the four most commonly used schemes of work[i]<\/a> for each language and then randomly sampled the words for the activity from these lists. This helped us to make sure that the words we are testing are likely to be words the children have encountered in their language lessons at school. You can read more about how we created the vocabulary test here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Phonics<\/h3>\n

For phonics<\/strong>, we created two short activities. In the first activity, children listen to a made-up word which contains a key sound from the language and have to decide which word they hear from three options.<\/p>\n

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In the second activity, the children hear a real, but unfamiliar, word in the language, and have to fill in the missing letter(s) to match the sound they hear:<\/p>\n

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Grammar<\/h3>\n

For grammar<\/strong>, we created a set of activities to see what children understand about key grammatical concepts in the language, including: articles, adjective endings, present tense verb endings, and negation. We created different versions of the activities for each year group, increasing in difficulty, with the activities for older children (who have been learning the language for longer) focussing on a wider range of structures.<\/p>\n

Here is an example from an adjective endings task for children in the first and second year of learning French:<\/p>\n

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And here is an example from an adjective endings task for children in the fourth year of learning French:<\/p>\n

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In the analysis of the grammar activities, the scores from the different versions were equated on a single scale, so that we could directly compare between them.<\/p>\n

Preliminary findings so far\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Here, we are focussing on the findings from the activities children completed in Spring\/Summer 2024. In our analysis, we compared the scores on each activity for children in their first year of learning French, German or Spanish (typically Year 3, age 7-8) to those of children in their second (typically Year 4, age 8-9), third (typically Year 5, age 9-10) and fourth (typically Year 6, age 10-11) year of learning the language. We wanted to see whether there is an increase in vocabulary, phonics and grammar knowledge<\/strong> with each additional year of study<\/strong>. We also looked at whether having a specialist teacher<\/strong> made a difference to any year-on-year changes. In addition, we considered children\u2019s School\/Class groupings within the analysis to account for differences across the different learning environments.<\/p>\n

Do we see an increase in children\u2019s vocabulary knowledge over time?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Across all three languages, we found that children\u2019s vocabulary knowledge significantly increased with each additional year of study. This suggests that the number of words that children can recognise in French, German and Spanish increases year-on-year. For German, we found a smaller, but still positive, difference between the vocabulary knowledge of children in their third versus fourth years of learning, whilst for Spanish progress plateaued in the fourth year.<\/p>\n

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Do we see an increase in children\u2019s phonics knowledge over time?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

For French and Spanish, as with vocabulary, we found a significant increase in children\u2019s phonics knowledge with each additional year of study. For German, we saw a more modest, but still positive, increase in phonics knowledge between children in their first year of learning compared to children in the fourth year of learning. This suggests that children do get better at recognising key sounds in the language with each year of learning.<\/p>\n

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Do we see an increase in children\u2019s grammar knowledge over time?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In terms of grammar learning, the picture was a little more mixed.<\/p>\n

For French and German, we found that the biggest increase in children\u2019s understanding of grammar happened between the first versus second year of learning the language, but there were minimal further changes in later years of learning. For Spanish, there was a significant difference between the first and third years of learning, but this plateaued in the fourth year. This suggests that there was some initial learning of basic grammatical concepts in the first one to two years of learning the language, but that further learning in later years was more limited.<\/p>\n

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We found that children\u2019s understanding of certain areas of grammar increased significantly between the first and second years of learning the language:<\/p>\n