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.

Developing ideas at A Level via authentic resources: a model lesson

I haven't written much in a while, due to revision sessions, oral exams etc.. but the Year 11s have now gone and tomorrow will be the last lesson with my Year 13s! So, I thought I would post something on A Level, specifically for Y12. This is a model lesson which exemplifies how I use authentic resources to give ideas on a given topic to my students, which they can adopt to discuss a point of view and make clear reference to Spanish society. In this particular case, the lesson follows the Edexcel Syllabus and concentrates on the impact of Tourism on the environment. 

Students had already done some work on Tourism and the impact it can have on the environment. This lesson meant to consolidate those general ideas and blend them with a real case scenario: Benidorm, ¿héroe o villano?

The first activity was a metacognition and retrieval practice opportunity for students to self-reflect, on vocabulary and ideas that they could remember, without access to notes, from previous lessons. I wanted students to work individually for this activity and self-assess themselves!

Secondly, I explained that we were going to look at a case study, Benidorm, and showed the following super short, Tik-Tok video. We watched it three times and students just described what they could see and the contrast of the images:

For this, I expected students to use the vocabulary they had recalled in their metacognition exercise. This video is, in essence, a post GCSE photocard task, which all students should be able to react to and improvise some ideas on. Look at this post on how I exploit Tik-Tok videos, instead of photocards with Year 11s. 

The purpose of the lesson was to instil ideas into the students, to do that, I decided to use an adaptation of the following authentic blogpost, through listening. I made a short summary of the blogpost and identified unknown, interesting and idiomatic vocabulary in the text: click here for my summary.

I created a Tarsia activity with such vocabulary and students matched the Spanish to the English.

The lesson followed with a listening activity where the new vocabulary would be key! I did this as a Dictogloss activity: I read my adaptation/summary of the blogpost to the students, twice. They took notes in English and/or Spanish, then, in pairs they reconstructed the text in writing.

Why Dictogloss? 

By doing this activity, students practised the skill of sumarising a text from an audio source, part of the A Level Paper 1 exam. 

Similarly, they were listening to two very good points of view about Benidorm as a tourist resort: a negative point of view, accusing the city of destroying the Spanish coast and a positive point of view, which defends Benidorm as a model of sustainable tourism, thanks to its skyscrapers, which concentrates lots of tourists in a small space. 

Students had to listen to these contradictory points of view steal and use them in future lessons to exemplify their own views on the topic.  Similarly, Dictogloss, allows me to personalise an ordinary listening activity, as I could act the text while reading it! By reading the text to students, I could pause, go slowly or faster, as needed,  and use gesture together with eye contact to put the text ideas across! 

Finally, students reconstructed the text into Spanish. After 20 minutes, students were given the transcript so they could compare their written versions to the real text. To finish the lesson, we all summarised the positive and negative points about Benidorm as a tourist resort. 

Follow up

Students were given a direct link to the original post, much longer and complex than my summarised version, and a 5 minute authentic video from La Sexta talking about Benidorm. For homework, students had to read the authentic text, watch the 5 minute video, take notes and write a 250 essay on Benidorm, ¿héroe o villano?

In subsequent lessons, students can create presentations and, ultimately, they can debate on the topic. 

GCSE Oral Preparation: Spicing up the Photocard Practice!

Happy Easter!  This is a second part to my previous post on GCSE oral preparation, which included some tips and activities for Y11s to practise the oral exam. Since I wrote that previous post and inspired by Naziha de Londres on Twitter and Russell Stannard on Youtube, I have created the following Padlet activity to practise, in a fun, relatable way, the photocard element of the GCSE exam.  

I have looked for catchy, short TikTok videos on the three different Themes for AQA, downloaded them and add them to a Padlet. 

The idea is for students to choose a video, watch it, and answer the questions, very similar to those found in the General Conversation and the Photocard, by recording them themselves with Padlet. As I have chose the Canva option in my Padlet, when students add their recording, they can link it to the video they are talking about. 

I like this approach because, not only students can practise the GCSE questions in a fun way!!! BUT they can hear everyone's answers as well. This is KEY: to learn from each other and perform some assessment for learning among students by applying the oral AQA mark Scheme. 

Of course, this activity can also be carried out using other apps, such as BookCreator, Flipgrid or just OneNote!  I just chose Padlet, as students do not need to log in to access the activity and everyone can have access to everyone's input.

I hope it is useful!

GCSE ORAL PREPARATION : the last push!

These days I am reading quite a lot about teachers who have just finished doing their oral mocks. We actually carried them out before Christmas, which means that now we are embarking on the last preparation tips just before the real thing, after the Easter Holiday.  

Whatever your situation, the window to perform the orals is nearly here and we, teachers, will use a significant amount of lesson time focusing on this skill, which students find so stressful, but key to score a decent mark to boost their final GCSE grade. 

We use AQA but the approach described below can be applied to any board.  

Practising the Role Play

Students can find this section of the exam very challenging as the prompts found in those Roleplays can be particularly odd. 

What works here is practice, practice, practice, so students can get as close to the 15 points as possible by being accurate and being concise! This is hard to understand as we always encourage them to extend answers! Well for the Roleplay, No! 

I always make a selection of past Roleplays and to start with (mid Y10 and beginning of Y11) I spend time going over the bullet points, analysing them and explaining what is “a detail”, which can be any piece of information! 

Example: ¿Qué hiciste el día de la excursión? 2 detalles: fui a un museo (detail 1) but instead of saying another activity, which requires conjugating a verb, hence risking making a mistake, students can just say por la tarde/con mi clase/ por la mañana/ con mi profesor (detail 2). It will score the same as saying: y vi muchos cuadros! 

I always start practising the Roleplays together as a class, with MWBs, so I can check for understanding and spot errors that we can comment on. This can take up to one lesson! 

At a second stage, after lots of modelling, students can move to practise the Roleplays in pairs. For this we have an oral booklet, click here, with Roleplays, Photocards (from specimen and past papers materials) and examples of general conversation questions. On the booklet, I include the Teacher’s sections, so students can practise easily in pairs or on their own, testing themselves! 

I also spend time practising how to ask questions. This is key! What’s the easiest way to ask a question in French, German, Spanish that would fit nearly any topic/situation? For me is, what do you think of? In both ways: the polite and familiar forms. Also, do you like…? Finally, depending on the Roleplay,  the question is there? is very useful! 

In my experience with these three questions students can answer the Roleplay well! What about having some starter, retrieval practice quick fire questions practising asking questions? This should be second nature! As the exam approaches, have a roleplay as a starter activity, to start with with MWBs

Practising the Photo Card 

I use a similar approach for this component to that used with the Roleplay but emphasising the idea that, in this section, they need to extend answers by giving reasons and providing examples using a different tense. 

We do this via MWBs with the whole class. We focus a lot on the first question: what is there in the photo? And use the PALM acronym (describing people, action, location, mood). Then, to stretch students we talk about imagining a little story using the structure: Creo que acaban de + infinitive (I think they have just….) or Creo que están a punto de + infinitive ( I think they are about to).

As with the Roleplay, having our oral booklet with all the Photocards and the teacher’s input is key! Once we do lots of modelling together with MWBs, students can then practise in pairs or individually with these. 

Tip: have a look at the questions used for the photocard by your exam board and include these questions, or similar ones, as part of your oral General Conversation model questions. These questions keep appearing in a similar format year after year, and by including them in your bank, students will be familiar with the questions even if they are surprise ones! 

Embedding the General Conversation in all lessons

This section is the core! We have a bank of questions, many taken from the Photocards, which students have been working on since the beginning of the GCSE course. Every time we finish a topic, students write model answers to that specific topic set of questions, and practise them in lessons with lots of games throughout the two year course! 

I make it clear they must not learn them by heart but it is good practice to have an idea of what can be said for each question, transfer the answers to flashcards and do active learning/ testing as from Y10 with our guide. We make sure these general conversation questions are embedded into our Scheme Work and all our lessons aim to reach fluency/communication having these as our final goal!

I like this approach as we don’t only tackle the oral aspect, but also the writing tasks, basically productive skills. 

To start with, especially to support weaker students, we practice the questions with MWBs: I say a question and everyone has 20 seconds to write the best possible answer they can think of. Then, we move to proper oral activities, mainly including games: snakes and ladders, connect for, Battleships or our latest addition, trivial!

To promote spontaneity, when practising these questions, you can ask students to answer the question using a specific structure. Check this Flippity activity. 

Finally, we have prepared a revision  Easter Padlet, consisting of slots of 45 minutes for three weeks, to be completed during the Easter vacation. The final push for them! For us the focus is the oral exam, which also includes the writing!!!

My experience, from 2018 and 2019 is that this approach works extremely well! 

Good luck to all Y11s who have to sit this GCSE ORAL EXAM!

Having high expectations: Encanto and Anchoring in challenge!

I have been very busy lately with mocks, teaching intensively and all the other million things that we, teachers, do, while fitting a couple of interviews in between (no right job yet!) However, today I wanted to share an example of having high expectations, what I mean by anchoring in challenge as from Y7 and how we can plant the seed of  different verb tenses as from an early age while incorporating communicative activities and a cultural twist/element to the lesson.

Below, you can find a lesson sequence to teach descriptions in Y7.

 

When I planned this lesson, students already knew how to describe their hair/eyes using “tengo” (I have) and physical appearance using “soy” (I am). During this lesson, for a mixed ability group, I intended to revise the same vocab but now making reference to the third person, while expecting students to refer to the past and the future.

Activity one, consisted of revising the vocab about descriptions that students already knew. For that, I created a Flippity activity with such structures, in Spanish. Students just translated them into English, using the “single name" setting in the Flippity activity, I used the cold calling technique for this. This was a quick fire activity based on retrieval practice. On a second round, I expected the students to shout: tengo or Soy, for each expression, as students tend to get confused between the two verbs! We also remembered the o/a option for adjectives such as delgado/a. 

After that, I explained that we would describe Maribel’s family in Encanto. To do that I asked if we could use Soy/Tengo and why not. I then showed them the following Sentence Builder. 

The Sentence Builder had the vocabulary students already knew, like descriptive expressions and family members but introduced: “tiene” “antes tenía” “me gustaría que tuviera”  “es” “antes era” “ me gustaría que fuera”. 

We did lots of modelling and repetition with “tiene” and “antes tenía” using the vocab on the sheet. I explained how the second structure, was already GCSE level, and I was teaching it to them because I had high expectations on them.  They felt special and loved it! That motivated them!

I explained how we can remember “tenía” by thinking of the number “ten” in English and “ear”, like in “tenear”= tenía. I showed this with gestures (showing my 10 fingers, followed by touching my ear):  dual coding. Then we moved to “es” which they already knew and “antes era” and I explained how we could remember this sgructure by thinking about  a “past era” in time! I modelled the structures with MWBs: dictations, and translation both ways. On this occasion, I just mentioned “ me gustaría que tuviera/ fuera” and how this was, specifically, a Y11 expression. I did a little bit of modelling too with the expression but it was there to stretch  the high flyers while having high expectations on all of them. I expect everyone to use it but we will need more lessons for this! Stealing sentences would work brilliantly at this stage too!

Next activity, to be done in a second lesson if necessary, was a Battleships oral activity for students to practise the structures we had modelled. They played in pairs and described La Familia Madrigal in the present and the past! High flyers were encouraged to make reference to the future. All students had the previous Sentence Builders with them so scaffolding was integrated. Note that I gave students the initials of the translations in Spanish to trigger memory. 

Finally, after a couple of minutes cold calling about “how do you say, I have, he has, he had, I am, he is, he was?” We played the Piñata game in teams (A and B). The game had the same sentences as in the Battleships game, reinforcement of structures, but now these sentences were in a different format. 

The Piñata Game 

A person from team A chooses a number from the board, before releasing what there is behind, I spin the wheel and someone from team A translates the sentence into Spanish. I reveal what is behind their chosen number: positive points, negative points, a robber (so they lose all the points) or swapping points with team B. Then we do the same with team B. I keep a tally with each team points. They love it!  The original template and game was created by the amazing Genially Queen, Marie Allirot.

By the end of the lesson/sequence of two lessons, students in Y7 could say small sentences using the present and past tenses! Many could make reference to the future, using the conditional and the imperfect subjunctive, too.  

This is the perfect example of what a lesson anchored in challenge and high expectations means to me. It will require much more imput to embed the imperfect/conditional/imperfect subjunctive into my students’ long term memory but with retrieval practice and the recycling of such structures in future topics, it will get done! On the other hand, the activities provided students with opportunities to communicate with real examples: the games, while relating to them adding the Encanto film as a context too.  As I said, more lessons will be needed to get to automaticity but the seed was well planted! In subsequent lessons, students can describe/create posters of the different characters, listen to the famous No se habla de Bruno song. My post is about maximising language with some culture references but if you are interested in carrying out a project on Encanto, these two websites, suggested by Barbara Montero, may  be useful. 

Un viaje encantador a Colombia

Discovering Encanto