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 rule, but also the ability to ignore their English phonics knowledge in this context. 

We could try to ignore this effect, and hope that it goes away with enough practice or some really impactful teaching activities, but I don’t think this works. Therefore, I’d rather start working explicitly to counter it straight away, when students first encounter a word. When I introduce a word, I tend to draw attention to the phonics, particularly if the word includes sounds that are difficult, or sound-spelling links that are opaque or more vulnerable to the transfer effect. So what could this look like in the classroom?

(After repetition of some sentences with a few instances of the target phoneme...) this sentence includes the word ‘campagne’, so let’s practice saying that together, repeat after me ‘campagne, cam-pa-gne’. What sound are we hearing at the end? ... gn. This is the same sound as in ‘onion’ or ‘canyon’. And what letters are we using in French to convey this sound? ... gn. Can we think of any other words we know in French using the same sound?... espagnol... look at your sentence builder, can you see any more? ...montagne, Espagne, Pologne. Let’s practice saying those together too, ‘montagne’, let’s break it into syllable to really focus on that gn sound, ‘mon-ta-gne’. Let’s go back to the first word we saw with this pattern, can we remember how to pronounce it?

The thinking behind this sort of questioning is to get students thinking deeply about the sounds and letter patterns they are seeing, to get them to use their ‘French brain’ or ‘Spanish brain’ rather than rely on their existing English phonics rules. We regularly practice this kind of explicit awareness through retrieval starters too, including questions like ‘how many words containing the sound ‘eu’ can you think of?’, or ‘what sound do all these words have in common: trois, moi, noir? What other words fit the pattern?’ This aims to activate the memory and recall of the phoneme and combat the forgetting curve.

If we treat target language phonemes as ‘knowledge’ students need to acquire, we can expect that they will still need lots of practice of each sound. In order to scaffold this, in my school we produce specific scaffolding sheets, like knowledge organisers, containing information about the more difficult phonemes that will come up most often with the current topic. I call these ‘phonics focus’ sheets, and we create one of these for every term. Each sheet has no more than 3 or 4 new phonemes, plus possibly a couple repeated from the previous topic that are still relevant. For each phoneme it lists the sound, the letter(s) or letter combo(s) used to make the sound, what the sound is similar to in English, and some example TL words containing the phoneme. I also use a phonics display with the same information – essentially, the phonics focus sheets are a smaller, more targeted version with just the few phonemes we are concentrating on that term.

For these selected phonemes, we spend time explicitly practicing paying attention to and producing the sound. Depending on the phoneme (how difficult it is to say and how strong the transfer effect is), this could be anything from a 10 minute task to a whole hour’s lesson. The impact of embedding this in KS3 is apparent in our teaching at KS4. Although we still do this pattern at KS4, we do this more responsively, ie. as and when there is a phoneme that students are particularly struggling with. 

A phonics focus lesson could look like this:

• A slide with 6-8 words containing the target phoneme, written in TL, with an image to show the meaning. You may also highlight or underline the corresponding grapheme.

• Lots of repetition/echoing activities – for example choral repetition, delayed repetition, or the competitive repetition game where students repeat the word only if the teacher says it correctly (also called ‘beat the teacher’). It is important that you don’t require students to speak independently before they have had enough practice to be able to actually do this yet; they will likely struggle and need to rely too much on their knowledge of English, and potentially become demotivated as a result. 

• Lots of careful, deliberate listening to the target sound – tally how many times you hear the sound (while listening to a word list, or possibly a poem, song or tongue twister). Afterwards, you can use the resource to practice speaking, repeating line by line or reading aloud. You could try multiple choice listening using a grid with 2 columns – identify whether the word you heard was the word in column A or B. You could also use a transcript – identify sounds or identify mispronunciations.

• Reading aloud – there are a variety of games which work well for this, for example battleships, trapdoor, mindreaders or 21. I tend to still highlight the target sounds so students think carefully about them when pronouncing them. The website Spreeder also allows students to practice reading the words really fast, as they appear (you could use the original list of 6-8 words for this, or add a few more). At this stage, students are actually practicing reading aloud rather than just echoing, so they are relying on a combination of their knowledge of the phoneme-grapheme rule, and their memory.

• Finally, isolate the phoneme rule by giving a short list of 3-5 new words containing the phoneme/grapheme you have been practicing, for students to have a go at working out how to say them. I always do this task Think Pair Share style, to help build confidence!

The Phonics Focus lesson would contain a selection of the above activities but would not need to contain all of them, as it really depends on the phoneme and your class. If students are struggling, they use the phonics focus sheet to remind them of the grapheme and what it sounds like. This is intended to be a supportive lesson, so the phoneme focus is really clear – feedback should be specific and praise plentiful! Remember for this to be embedded successfully, there needs to be further retrieval opportunities after this focussed lesson, for example in starter/'do now' tasks as mentioned earlier, or as part of later lessons on listening, reading, writing, grammar etc.

With phonics embedded in this way, it is taught regularly, explicitly, and supportively.