What teachers need to know about phonetics (part 1)

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 funny, puff, photo, laugh), and graphemes can be used to write many different phonemes, (ie. the many sounds/phonemes that can be represented by the grapheme 'o' in odd, no, son, to). 

We can link these quite easily to students’ prior knowledge of English. To demonstrate the difference between phonemes and letters, I typically start by asking students to count the phonemes in some English words. My usual examples are ‘cat’, ‘shop’ and ‘thought’, which all contain 3 phonemes each. I then ask students to think of all the different ways we can spell the sound/phoneme ‘k’ in English, for example k (as in king), c (as in cat), ch (as in choir), qu (as in quiz), ck (as in brick) etc. After having practiced with English, to secure their understanding, they may also be able to practice similarly with TL and the target phonemes you have taught. 

There are also some terms that may be helpful for a teacher’s understanding of phonetics. When teaching literacy in English we typically put letters into just two categories of consonants and vowels. In linguistics, however, we categorise sounds based on how they are produced in the mouth. I think these are much more useful for teaching phonics; we do need to be aware, for example, that there are many more than just 5 vowel sounds! 

Consonants can be produced with different amounts of airflow. Plosives (eg. p/b/t/d/k/g) are a type of consonant produced by stopping the airflow momentarily. Fricatives (eg. s/z/sh/zh) are created when airflow is forced through a narrow opening in the mouth. Approximants (eg. l/r/w/y) have a larger opening in the mouth for the airflow; these are the closest consonant category to vowels, which have no restriction of the airflow.  

Linguistics also categorise consonant sounds depending on the place of articulation, or where in the mouth they are produced, ie. where the closure stopping or restricting the airflow happens. The infographic below helps you to picture this: 

For example: when attempting to say the French ‘r’ sound, it can be helpful to explain the science behind how we make this sound with our mouths. Although ‘r’ is an approximant sound in English, in French it’s a fricative, so we could tell students their mouths should be more closed. In English, the sound is produced at the alveolar ridge, but in French it is uvular, so in French is also a bit further back in the mouth towards the throat. 

There are many sounds in common between English and French. Where this is the case, the main challenge for students is related to the link between the sound and the potentially different spellings in each language. Students need lots of practice listening to the target phoneme AND linking it to the written form and the spelling. 

I will discuss vowels in part 2. See you then! 

Popular posts from this blog

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
Read more

Reflections on reading aloud

Image
Reading aloud in MFL has always been important, but with the changes to the new GCSE it has become even more so. I have been thinking about and experimenting with this a lot recently and wanted to share some reflections.  I think about reading aloud as having 2 distinct stages or sub-skills: echoing and independence. To me echoing is about holding a sound in the auditory working memory and accurately repeating it back. This is an important first step to achieve before being able to be independent, meaning to be able to see a word and accurately say it.  There are many activities that are about repeating TL words, chunks, and sentences, and I feel that much of what we do as language teachers is find many different engaging ways to repeat the same things, so students can adequately practice skills and vocab. This means that repetition tends to be quite gamified, for example choral repetition, and delayed repetition.  This is ideally placed at the modelling stage. When I first started my
Read more

Three key principles for phonics teaching

Image
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
Read more