Bethlingual - Beth M's MFL blog

In order for students to be comfortable recognising and eventually using phonemes in the target language, there needs to be lots of listening and exposure to the target sounds.  I think listening is a bit of an underrated skill, and potentially isn’t given as much time as it should be. However, in my school context, we often find that listening is the score with the highest results. In addition, I find that when listening is done really well, speaking becomes much easier for students. We do listening in every lesson, and the task type is different depending on the stage of learning of the students. At the start of a new topic, this might be choral repetition (listening and repeating), or sentence bingo, or sentence chaos (listening and identifying a specific sentence). It could be activities requiring closer listening, such as break the flow (adding spaces between words), faulty transcript tasks (spot the extra word or the pronunciation mistake), reordering words in a sentence, or...

Phonics needs to be taught explicitly. This is particularly true when we have very little teaching time per fortnight, and especially for less phonetically transparent languages like French. Phonics is embedded within every single lesson I teach, in a variety of ways. As well as being explicitly taught, I argue that it needs to be scaffolded, and needs to be deliberately practiced, not only by actually saying the target sounds, but by listening too. I’m aware that there are differing opinions on this, but I think when we introduce new vocab, it should be with the spoken and written forms at the same time. With lots of the phonemes we need to teach, we have to counter the transfer effect, where a student’s knowledge of English ‘competes’ with what it sounds like in the target language. For example in English the grapheme ‘oi’ sounds like oy in boy, but in French the same grapheme sounds like wa in wag; this means that students have to not only have the knowledge of the French phonic rul...

Within a successful lesson, students should have opportunities to learn and/or consolidate vocabulary and structures by practicing some of the core skills – speaking, listening, reading, writing. Teachers should have a clear idea of what they want students to know and be able to do during the lesson and wider unit, and they should assess how well this has been learned, in order to adapt the teaching so it is effective for all. However, teachers also have little time and a huge workload! I recently read a discussion about how long planning lessons can take, and wanted to share some tips to help speed this process up.  Lessons are all about the learners and how they are developing. In my department we use the EPI methodology, which breaks down the key stages of development in a really clear way, but the principles shared here can apply to any classroom. There is no point expecting learners to be able to run before they can walk – this is simply a recipe for frustration, for us and th...