Bethlingual - Beth M's MFL blog

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 

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