Enjoyment of language learning, confidence in communication, and appreciation for diverse cultures remain central to the Middle School experience. 

The department expects that students completing the Middle School program will be able to understand, speak, read, and write French or Spanish at a level that enables them to meet practical and social needs in a variety of authentic contexts. While oral proficiency is the primary focus of the program, interpretive (reading and listening) and presentational (writing and speaking) skills are developed in an integrated manner.

Guided by a Comprehensible Input (CI) approach, students acquire language through stories, authentic resources, literature, music, film, conversation, and other engaging experiences that make language understandable and meaningful. Grammar and vocabulary are taught in service of communication rather than as isolated objectives, enabling students to develop both fluency and accuracy over time. 

In sixth grade, students establish a strong communicative foundation by acquiring high frequency vocabulary and language structures through units centered on everyday situations and culturally meaningful themes. As students progress through seventh and eighth grade, they engage in increasingly sophisticated communication while strengthening oral proficiency, reading and listening comprehension, vocabulary, sentence structure, and grammatical accuracy. Assessment is ongoing and proficiency-based, reflecting students’ day-to-day growth through a variety of formative and summative measures.