Key Stage 3 languages · Grammar and vocabulary

KS3 languages grammar: key structures and patterns

At Key Stage 3, children move from repeating set phrases to building sentences of their own. To do that they need the main grammatical patterns of the language their school teaches: how verbs change for different people and times, how adjectives agree with nouns, and how negatives and questions are formed. The aim is to be able to change a pattern to say something new, not just to recite what was learned.

Key grammatical structures, explained

The National Curriculum asks schools to teach pupils to use and manipulate a variety of key grammatical structures and patterns, on a sound foundation of core grammar and vocabulary. “Manipulate” is the important word. A child who has memorised “Je joue au football” knows one sentence. A child who can turn it into “My brother doesn’t play football” or “Tomorrow we are going to play football” has understood the pattern underneath. Schools choose which modern language to teach at this stage, most often French, Spanish or German, and this page uses French and Spanish for its examples.

The programme of study does not list the structures, so schools decide. Most cover the same core: verb endings for different people (I, you, he or she, we, they), the way nouns have a gender that affects the little words and adjectives around them, adjectives that agree with the noun, negatives, questions, possessives such as “my” and “your”, comparing things, and modal verbs, the “I want to” and “I can” verbs that are followed by an infinitive. Talking about the present, past and future has its own strand in the curriculum, so those tenses are covered on separate pages.

In the classroom you will often see sentences broken into coloured parts or laid out in a grid, so a child can pick one piece from each column and build a sentence. This is a scaffold. Over Years 7 to 9 the scaffold is taken away: children first change one part of a sentence, then several, and finally build whole answers when someone speaks to them. Teachers also practise each pattern through listening, speaking, reading and writing, because a rule that a child can explain but cannot say aloud is not yet secure.

Another thing that surprises parents is how little word-for-word translation helps. English and other languages express the same idea with different patterns. English uses “I play” and “I am playing”, where French has a single present tense for both. English says “I am thirteen”, where French and Spanish say “I have thirteen years”. Children learn to think in the patterns of the new language and to ask what the sentence is doing, rather than hunting for English words one by one.

Progress at this stage often looks uneven. A child may fill in a grammar exercise perfectly but make the same slip when speaking, because speaking leaves less time to think. That is normal, and it improves with frequent, low-pressure use. The patterns learned in Years 7 to 9 are the foundation for GCSE courses, where pupils are expected to use a wider range of structures with greater accuracy.

Words your child will hear

Infinitive: The basic, dictionary form of a verb, such as jouer (French) or jugar (Spanish), meaning “to play”.
Conjugate: To change a verb so it fits the person and time: jouer becomes je joue, nous jouons, ils jouent.
Stem and ending: A regular verb is its stem (jou-) plus an ending that shows who is doing it and when.
Subject pronoun: A word such as je, tu, il, elle, nous, vous, ils (French) or yo, tú, él, ella (Spanish) that stands in for the person doing the action.
Agreement: Matching an adjective or other word to the noun it describes, in gender (masculine or feminine) and number (one or many).
Gender: Whether a noun is masculine or feminine. It is a grammar label, not about the meaning, so a table can be feminine in French (la table).
Word order: The usual sequence of words in a sentence, which can differ from English, for example where negatives and adjectives sit.

What the National Curriculum says

The programme of study for Key Stage 3 says:

Pupils should be taught to use and manipulate a variety of key grammatical structures and patterns, including voices and moods, as appropriate
Teaching should focus on developing the breadth and depth of pupils’ competence in listening, speaking, reading and writing, based on a sound foundation of core grammar and vocabulary.

Objectives from the National Curriculum in England, © Crown copyright, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Try it: changing one sentence in five ways

Start with the French sentence “Je joue au football” (I play football). Change it so that it says who else plays, that they do not play, that they played, that they will play, and why.

Spot the pattern. The sentence is a subject (je), a verb (joue, from jouer, stem jou- plus the ending -e) and the thing played (au football). The Spanish equivalent is “Juego al fútbol”, where the verb jugar changes its stem (juego), a pattern of its own to learn.
Change the person. Replace je with “mon frère” and the verb follows: “Mon frère joue au football.” For he or she, a regular -er verb keeps the ending -e. In Spanish: “Mi hermano juega al fútbol.”
Make it negative. In French, ne goes before the verb and pas after it, wrapping the verb: “Mon frère ne joue pas au football.” In Spanish, no goes in front: “Mi hermano no juega al fútbol.”
Put it in the past. Go back to the positive sentence. French uses avoir plus a past participle (jou- plus é): “Hier, mon frère a joué au football.” Spanish uses a different past form: “Ayer mi hermano jugó al fútbol.”
Put it in the future. Go back again and use the verb “to go” plus an infinitive: “Demain, mon frère va jouer au football.” In Spanish: “Mañana mi hermano va a jugar al fútbol.”
Add a reason. Join two ideas with a connective, and the new part needs its own subject and verb: “Mon frère joue au football parce qu’il aime le sport.” In Spanish: “Mi hermano juega al fútbol porque le gusta el deporte.”

Mon frère joue au football. / Mon frère ne joue pas au football. / Hier, mon frère a joué au football. / Demain, mon frère va jouer au football. / Mon frère joue au football parce qu’il aime le sport.

Common mistakes and how to help

Translating word for word from English

English has “I play” and “I am playing”, but French has one present tense that covers both, so “je suis jouant” is wrong. English also needs “do” in questions and negatives, which French and Spanish do not.

What helps: Ask your child what the sentence is doing, not what each word means. Compare a few English and French sentences side by side and look for the patterns that differ.

Leaving the verb in the infinitive after the subject

The infinitive is what the dictionary and the vocabulary list show, so “mon frère jouer” or “yo jugar” feels natural. The ending is what tells the listener who is acting.

What helps: Ask “who is doing it?” before every verb, then pick the ending for that person. Saying the whole set of endings aloud (je joue, tu joues, il joue) helps them stick.

Forgetting that adjectives agree and often follow the noun

In English the adjective comes first and never changes. In French and Spanish most adjectives come after the noun and match it in gender and number, so children write “les filles sont petit” (it should be petites) or “una casa pequeño” (it should be pequeña). A few common French adjectives, such as petit, grand and beau, come before the noun: “une grande maison”.

What helps: Have your child write a noun, then decide its gender and number, then add the adjective and match it. Patterns like “une voiture rouge, des voitures rouges” or “un coche rojo, una casa roja” are worth saying aloud.

Treating learned phrases as fixed blocks that cannot be changed

Children learn “je voudrais un café” as a unit and do not realise that voudrais can be followed by an infinitive, or that je can be swapped for another subject. They then cannot adapt the phrase when the situation changes.

What helps: Once a phrase is secure, change one piece at a time and see whether it still works. Playing at swapping the subject, the tense or the ending builds flexibility.

How to help at home

Change one thing. Say a simple sentence from your child’s book and ask them to change one part: who is doing it, make it negative, say it happened yesterday. One change at a time keeps it short and builds the habit of manipulating the pattern.
Let them teach you. Ask your child to explain a rule to you in English, such as why an ending changed or where the adjective goes. Explaining shows quickly what is secure. Make a deliberate mistake now and then and let them correct you.
Hunt for patterns. Take a short song lyric or a paragraph from their reader and underline every verb. Which ones end the same way? Which have different endings, and who is doing the action in each?
Build a personal sentence bank. Keep five sentences about your child’s own life, such as their family, hobbies and home. Each week, change them: add a negative, a past version, a reason. Real details are easier to remember than invented ones.
Reorder the words. Write the words of a sentence on scraps of paper, shuffle them and ask your child to rebuild it. This makes word order visible, which matters most for negatives, questions and adjectives that sit where English would not put them.

Builds on

Key Stage 2: Building vocabulary
Key Stage 2: Using a bilingual dictionary
Key Stage 2: Masculine, feminine and neuter nouns
Key Stage 2: High-frequency verbs
Key Stage 2: Patterns and building sentences
Key Stage 2: Comparing a language with English