Embedded Phonics: nothing revolutionary, it is what learning languages is about!

I have wanted to write a post about Phonics for a long time, especially after the announcement that a new GCSE was going to be launched, focussing on the NCELP three Pillars of Grammar, Vocabulary and Phonics. It struck me that the new GCSE was implying that, currently, we did not teach enough, if at all, Phonics in the MFL classroom. 

Well, if we teach languages and we teach listening/speaking, irremediably, we are teaching Phonics!

The way I teach Phonics is through an embedded approach, rather than a Synthetic one, which seems to be the case for NCELP.

What is Phonics?

Phonics is actually a teaching method (as apposed to Phonetics which is the science of studying speech sounds) which consists in learning how the different graphemes in a given language correspond to specific sounds, which we call phonemes when referring to linguistics or a language in abstract.

Having this knowledge is key for any language learner as it is the foundation of pronunciation, hence communication in the target language and, equally important, it allows learners to understand the spoken language, by making a correlation between the sounds they hear to specific graphemes, and ultimately meaning.

Phonics and lexicogrammar

As you know, I follow a lexicogrammar approach to teaching languages, which works wonders for all different ability levels, inspired by Dr Gianfranco Conti. I have heard criticism to the Lexicogrammar / EPI approach implying that it does not teach Phonics, neither Grammar nor individual Words. I can assure it does! 

I teach Phonics embedded in all the stages of the learning journey. When preparing our Sentence Builders, my team and I always make sure that we include a wide range of words containing key sounds in Spanish, and at some point, as we do with grammar, this is explicitly pointed out. However, we don’t teach such words//sounds in isolation as a synthetic approach would do.

This way, our students will have being exposed and extensively practised, all the sounds specific to the Spanish language and its correspondent grapheme within a year starting in Y7. Yes, I teach Spanish, so doing this is so much easier in this language than in French, as Spanish, as German, is a phonetic language.  

For example, in Y7, students learn phonics from their first lessons, when they learn how to say their name and how they are feeling in Spanish. Our Sentence Builders will include names such as:

Alejandro, to teach the sound/phoneme /x/ which corresponds to the grapheme  j 

Hector, to teach that the grapheme h in Spanish is mute and does not correspond to any phoneme, we just don't pronounce it!

Ramón, to teach the phoneme /r/ and later on, in the topic of Free Time, correr, to explain how the phoneme /r/ corresponds to the grapheme r at the beginning of a letter or rr between vowels.

Me llamo, to teach the phoneme /ʎ/ or Tengo sueño, when teaching ¿Cómo estás? to teach the phoneme /ɲ/ . 

How do I teach Phonics?

Embedded in all the stages of the learning language, through lots, lots of modelling activities and structured practice tasks, as part of the memorisation and, ultimately, automatization of the language, to achieve fluent communication. 

Below you can find a selection of some of my favourite activities that I use at each stage of the learning process, many inspired by Dr Gianfranco Conti’s and Steve Smith’s book Breaking the Sound barrier. There are more but this is just a selection.  

Some of my favourite activities at the Modelling stage:

Repetition in different ways/voices to model pronunciation: chanting, singing, angry. 

Dictations, normal dictations, gapped dictations, delayed dictation (same as a normal dictation but students have to wait around 10 seconds before they are allowed to write the words/ sentences they hear). I do this, initially, with short chunks to, increasingly, using longer sentences and chunks combinations.

I start a word and students finish it

Descriminatory games where I say two words with a distinctive phoneme and students need to decide which represents a specific cleaning: hago patinaje versus hice patinaje or haré patinaje. Which one refers to the past? This is important, as phonemes are the smallest linguistic unit which has an impact on meaning.

Bad listening, where I give students a text, I read it with subtle differences and students need to sport such differences.

Battleship listening, where I give students  battleships grid, filled with small sentences, I say about 10 of the and  students write the coordinate of my sentences.

Pyramid listening , where I small chunk which progressively gets longer as we advance in the pyramid and students need to transcribe what they hear.

Faulty echo, where I say words with the wrong pronunciation and students must identify where the mistake lays.

Basically, I expose my students to lots of listening activities in the Modelling stage, so that they become familiar with different phonemes or sounds, making a direct correlation, via the sentence builder, to their correspondent graphemes and therefore to meaning. 

For an exhaustive list of listening activities, visit this blogpost. To do this successfully, it is important to personalise these listening tasks and not just carry out listening activities via a given textbook audio to test meaning only,  but to use listening tasks, via my voice, live, as a learning tool, to focus on the correlation of graphemes and sounds/phonemes. 

Before using commercialised listening tasks, I also create my own listening material, which allows me to continue personalising my listening activities, when using longer audio passages to focus on meaning. For this, I use, any online recording app, like Mote, Vocaroo or I use speaking Bitmojis, and Snapchat videos! 

Below, you can find a short video, under a minute, for my Y9 students on the topic of Coco.T The video will be the basis of a listening task: fill in the gaps, questions, summarising, translating etc..

In other words, Phonics is strongly linked to listening and it is tackled when we carry out listening tasks heavily based on vocabulary from our Sentence Builder.

After modelling, for at least a lesson, sometimes two lessons, at the Structured Practice stage, I plan lots of reading aloud activities. The idea here, is for students to practice the sounds that they have extensively listened to and have already made correspondence to graphemes and meaning, in the previous learning stage. 

Some of my favourite activities at the Structured Practice stage:

Stealing Sentences

Reading Battleships (same as listening battleships but students read the sentences now and play the game in pairs, where they need to find out the coordinates of their partner’s.

Oral Ping-Pong

Pyramid translations 

....and any choral reading aloud activity, performed as a class or in pairs using Wheel of names, or Flippity, which will allow students to practise the pronunciation of words, hence, doing Phonics. 

There's no need to say that phonics or saying words in good/correct pronunciation, will continue in the Spontaneous and Routinisation learning stages. 

Do I teach  Phonics explicitly and in isolation?

Explicitly yes! At some point in the learning journey, sometimes as early as at the Modelling stage, I will point out, explicitly, the correspondence of sound/phoneme and grapheme. Sometimes later. This is super useful when new words, with the same sound, appear later in the course and I ask students to predict how to pronounce them based on their knowledge of  phonics and the corresponde of phoneme/grapheme.

In isolation, no! My experience is that students forget words when taught out of context. My experience is that learning Vocabulary(Meaning)-Grammar-Phonics all at once (Lexicogrammar), via our Sentence Builders, reduces cognitive overload and facilitates the transfer of structures/vocabulary to the long term memory.

To sum up, I teach Phonics as I teach Spanish and I teach how to pronounce words and students consistently learn how to link sounds to graphemes. So, nothing new from the new GCSE, neither worried about a Dictation task as part of the new GCSE assessment, although I will argue the communicative value of such exercise in an exam! I teach Phonics because I teach Spanish via a Lexicogrammar Approach.