Bethlingual - building confident and successful MFL learners

I love linguistics, particularly phonetics and phonology. As an MFL teacher, this has been an asset for me and really helped me and my department to teach phonics well. In part 1 of this series about how linguistics knowledge can help teachers, I talked about some key phonics terminology and how linguists think about consonants.  I think vowels can be much more difficult than consonants to describe, and for our students to get right, particularly in French. However, they are still very important, and very interesting...  Unlike consonants, vowels are all made without an obstruction of airflow , so it is harder to form distinct categories. When talking about vowels, linguists consider the mouth as a trapezium, calling this the ‘ vowel space ’.    The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a system of phonetic notation in which every possible distinct sound (phoneme) has one consistent symbol to represent it. The IPA depiction of the vowel space is below:  The ...

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 f unny, pu ff , ph oto, lau gh ), and graphemes can be used to write many different phonemes, (ie. the many sounds/phonemes that can be represented by the grapheme ...