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Teaching phonics through key words: Lexical Sets

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I studied linguistics at university, including lots of modules about phonetics and phonology, as well as sociophonetics, or language variation and change. This included working on how the use and perception of accents can show identity. I’m now passionate about using this knowledge to teach phonics and speaking effectively. This post focuses on a method for French, which has the largest number of tricky phonics for our students to grasp.  What are Lexical Sets?  A fantastic method I used extensively throughout my degree was Wells’ Lexical Sets  ( J.C.Wells, 1982, Accents of English ). Wells came up with a clever way of referring to vowels, and created a set of words containing each vowel. Each vowel in English has a key word containing that vowel, which means we can refer to a sound clearly and accurately,  even when different accents produce it slightly differently . It also allows us to talk about multiple words all containing the same sound. The diagram below, from All Things Lingui
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Three key principles for phonics teaching

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As an MFL teacher with a dual degree in linguistics and French, I am passionate about teaching phonics well, and I have the subject knowledge to back it up. Here are some practical principles and activities to incorporate phonics effectively in your lessons.  Principle 1: Have a clear and specific phonics focus  In UK secondary schools, we do not have enough teaching time to deal with phonics implicitly: we need to be deliberate about the key sounds we want students to know, and we need to talk about them and practice them explicitly .  Much like other elements of our teaching, we also need to be careful not to give students cognitive overload. There is no point trying to teach too many sounds at the same time, because students will likely forget the sounds at best, and get confused and demotivated at worst. My school teaches with EPI and sentence builders, and for each sub-topic we carefully consider the most important sounds and focus on these. For the next topic, we incorporate retr
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What teachers need to know about phonetics (part 2)

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I love linguistics, particularly phonetics and phonology. As an MFL teacher, this has been an asset for me and really helped me and my department to teach phonics well. In part 1 of this series about how linguistics knowledge can help teachers, I talked about some key phonics terminology and how linguists think about consonants.  I think vowels can be much more difficult than consonants to describe, and for our students to get right, particularly in French. However, they are still very important, and very interesting...  Unlike consonants, vowels are all made without an obstruction of airflow , so it is harder to form distinct categories. When talking about vowels, linguists consider the mouth as a trapezium, calling this the ‘ vowel space ’.    The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a system of phonetic notation in which every possible distinct sound (phoneme) has one consistent symbol to represent it. The IPA depiction of the vowel space is below:  The upper, wider part of the
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What teachers need to know about phonetics (part 1)

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As an MFL teacher with a dual degree in linguistics and French, I am passionate about teaching phonics well, and I have the subject knowledge to back it up. Therefore, here is my explanation of some important terminology in phonics, and some ways of categorising consonant sounds in linguistics, to better understand them and how to teach them. When teaching phonics, I think teachers need to have a solid grasp on the key terminology, and I recommend using these with students too. Firstly, we have phoneme : the smallest unit of sound, and grapheme : the letter(s) used to write a unit of sound. The number of phonemes and/or graphemes in a word do not necessarily correspond to the number of letters. Phonemes can be written by many different graphemes, (ie. the many ways the sound/phoneme 'f' can be written, such as in f unny, pu ff , ph oto, lau gh ), and graphemes can be used to write many different phonemes, (ie. the many sounds/phonemes that can be represented by the grapheme 
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2-minute Speaking Questions Challenge - a quick idea to develop oracy and speaking confidence in MFL

Over the last academic year, I was working on developing oracy and speaking skills with my classes. I wanted to implement more opportunities for students to practice speaking in the target language and to build their confidence.  In my current school context (non-selective state school, high number of SEND/PP/FSM), I felt that our biggest challenges to overcome were:  Willingness to speak in TL (motivation)  Knowing confidently how to pronounce what they want to say (phonics) Understanding what a TL question means, and using this to help with their answers (comprehension) Therefore, I’ve developed what I refer to as the ‘2-minute Speaking Questions Challenge’ to attempt to tackle these issues and help students to speak confidently in the target language (we teach French and Spanish). This was very successful this year, and students engaged well; we’ve rolled it out across the entire department this year.   It also links to the demands of the new GCSE – students will need to be able to
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