Teaching phonics through key words: Lexical Sets

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 Linguistic, shows the key words associated with each lexical set in English, including where in the mouth the vowels tend to be pronounced: 

Since becoming an MFL teacher, I found that I often wanted to identify a sound by using Wells’ Lexical Sets, and I thought that the idea could in fact be quite useful to students, with a little adaptation. 

There are some existing phonics schemes which teach specific target language phonemes by linking a target language word containing the sound, and possibly also a gesture and/or image to help remember the meaning of the TL key word. For this to be useful for learning phonics, this means students need to learn the key word, AND what the word sounds like. If we use English key words, students only need to learn the key word. They already know what it sounds like. 

Of course, the original Lexical Sets are based on English, so there is not a set or key word for certain sounds in French. It is also designed for vowels, given how flexible they are in where they can be produced within the vowel space (see my blog post on What teachers need to know about phonetics), but in fact, they could be helpful for consonants too, particularly when letters make a different sound in French and English. 

I developed, using Wells’ Lexical Sets as a starting point, a set of words we can use to refer to all the important phonemes in French. I have since updated this to match all the phonemes required for the new GCSE. On my TES shop you can get a display of these sets, plus other important phonics explanations, with accompanying images and examples. There are 25 PDF posters included, with a clear design, images, and example French words.  

How Lexical Sets can be helpful to students and teachers

It makes the abstract concrete: you can give students a concrete example of the target sound, using words they are already confident in. This means that students are able to ‘sound it out’ independently. I have also found that students are much more confident in their speaking, including when correcting their peers in paired speaking tasks. 

In the case of some trickier vowels, we must be aware that the Lexical Sets give students a target ‘zone’ in the vowel space to aim for when pronouncing the sound. This may be an allophone of the sound used by a native speaker, but it still ensures students are clearly understandable, albeit with an English accent. For an in-depth explanation about this, please see my blog post, What teachers need to know about phonetics. 

The attached images help to dual-code the key words and make it more fun and accessible. We could use just the images to help jog students’ memories about a sound, building confidence in reading aloud. The cognitive load is reduced, because they already know the sound in English, rather than having to make a connection to the sound through another target language item of vocabulary. This also helps us free up precious curriculum time, as students are ready to go that bit quicker. 

This system develops students’ metacognitive knowledge, as they can talk about their phonics knowledge. This helps your questioning of their understanding to be more precise. For example, when working on a task listening for mispronunciations, students can clearly and precisely talk about which sound was wrong and what it should sound like. Sometimes students can feel self-conscious when trying to say a sound aloud in TL, but again, using a word in English helps to avoid this issue. This also lends itself to some precise discussions in ‘odd one out’ tasks, where students would be required to read spellings of words and identify the relevant phonemes. 

There are some sounds where this approach would not be helpful, and could even lead to confusion, ie. the ‘oo’ at the front of the mouth in French, such as in ‘tu’. I think this is a case of professional judgement, and where the scientific approach previously discussed could be more helpful, along with carefully thought-out listening tasks and modelled repetition practice. 

So, download the classroom display resource from my TES shop, and give it a go with your classes!