How I embed phonics in my teaching
Phonics needs to be taught explicitly. This is particularly true when we have very little teaching time per fortnight, and especially for less phonetically transparent languages like French. Phonics is embedded within every single lesson I teach, in a variety of ways. As well as being explicitly taught, I argue that it needs to be scaffolded, and needs to be deliberately practiced, not only by actually saying the target sounds, but by listening too. I’m aware that there are differing opinions on this, but I think when we introduce new vocab, it should be with the spoken and written forms at the same time. With lots of the phonemes we need to teach, we have to counter the transfer effect, where a student’s knowledge of English ‘competes’ with what it sounds like in the target language. For example in English the grapheme ‘oi’ sounds like oy in boy, but in French the same grapheme sounds like wa in wag; this means that students have to not only have the knowledge of the French phonic rul...