Three key principles for phonics teaching

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 retrieval practice of previous sounds, while adding more.  

To decide the most important sounds, I think about what could affect accurate communication: sounds that change the meaning of a word and sounds that come up most often ie. in the key verbs of a sentence. For example, within the topic of food and drink in French, two important sounds were ‘an’ and ‘oi’, as these come up particularly frequently in ‘je mange’ (I eat) and ‘je bois’ (I drink) and it could cause some confusion if mis-pronounced. 


Principle 2: Teach phonics sub-skills in order 

We can’t expect students to say a sound accurately without having heard it. In order to build confidence and accuracy, we need to make sure students are ready, with the necessary knowledge to move to the next stage. In other words, why are we using this task, at this time. 

The first sub-skill would be listening and recognising the sound in relation to its spelling. For this, I always start teaching new vocabulary with listening tasks like faulty echo, listening multiple choice, bingo, spot the intruder words, etc (these activities have been popularised and developed through Conti’s EPI methodology, you can find more on his blog).  

After several listens, students are ready to start producing sounds themselves. It is important to remember that auditory working memory is even shorter than visual working memory, so students will only remember the sound you have just modelled for approximately 2-4 seconds.  

As part of lesson 1, my modelling listening, students will practice some form of repetition, such as choral repetition or delayed repetition (students have to hold the sound in their head for a short while, repeating it back to themselves several times). Games like Beat the Teacher work well at this stage – students repeat the word, unless the teacher says it wrong, in which case they are silent.  

After listening to and repeating sounds, students will be ready to be able to pronounce words looking at the written form. My groups enjoy tasks like Spreeder (speed reading), attention à la bombe (‘21’ style game reading sentences 1, 2, or 3 words at a time, trying not to read the last word), or the classic trapdoor. For these activties, I typically emphasize that the focus is on phonics; I highlight or annotate the important target sounds to help focus student attention, such as in the photo below: 

After all this, students take part in meaning-focused speaking activities. Because of all the earlier stages, their phonics knowledge is secure enough that their pronunciation is accurate even while they are focusing on another element of the task. 


Principle 3: Check understanding effectively to build independence 

One of the difficulties with speaking tasks in lessons is making sure students don’t end up learning and practicing misconceptions. As teachers, we need to make sure that speaking tasks, like all tasks, are designed to challenge but not overwhelm students at their current level of knowledge. This doesn’t mean that we necessarily have to wait until students have really secure knowledge of a target sound, but we do need to choose tasks judiciously.  

I suggest starting with teacher-led, whole class practice. These tasks are typically more repetitive in style so the teacher can model correct pronunciation, and they get used to speaking the new TL vocab early in the sequence of learning. It can be helpful to practice a task as a whole class before students do it independently, to check for and address misconceptions.  

When students have a task for small groups (pairs, threes, or more), it’s a good idea to ensure that all students have a specific role, that swaps around so all students are speaking. It should be central to the task that what they are saying in TL is understood (and responded to in some way); in this way students are using the language for communicating something. While working, the teacher can monitor engagement and address any persisting misconceptions, and ideally, praise students for great pronunciation.  



In addition, please read my blog posts on ‘What teachers need to know about phonetics’! This is a 2-part series looking in detail at consonants and vowels, how they are produced, and how we can use this knowledge to help our students improve at phonics. 

If you are a teacher looking to improve your subject knowledge of phonetics, I would recommend the following resources: 

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