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French Phonics – Letter Reversals

French phonics: phonics is about the correspondence of sounds to written letters or letter combinations.

When working with French phonics, there are some things you want to keep in mind.

Actually there are many things, but today we’ll focus on one of them 🙂

We’ll be talking about letter reversals.

French Phonics – Letter Reversals

First thing to remember is that there are two kinds of reversals: left/right and up/down.

Left/right reversal is the most common kind. This is the one that makes kids confuse letters such as b/d, and p/q.

Up/down reversal is less common. This is the one that makes kids confuse letters such as n/u.

How do letter reversals affect the teaching of French phonics?

Letter reversals MIGHT be a sign of dyslexia, but I won’t get into that as I don’t have the expertise to talk about the topic. If you suspect your student or your child is dyslexic, seek expert advice.

Besides dyslexia, there may be many different causes for letter reversal, but it usually stems from decoding issues.

When students are learning to decode, letter and word confusions are absolutely normal. However, as their decoding skills improve, they should be reversing letters less and less often.

If they’re still confusing similar-looking letters, they might still not have mastered directional tracking. Proper directional tracking is key to reading accuracy and fluency.

If your students confuse b and d, they’ll end up confusing br and dr.

If they confuse u and n, they won’t be able to read sous and sons correctly.

If they aren’t able to properly decode letters, they’ll mix up ain/ian, ein/ien, and oin/ion.

And that’s how letter reversals, if not properly and timely addressed, will hinder the development of reading skills in French.

Read: French Sounds Cut and Paste Minibook

Read: French Phonics Foldable Flaps

What can teachers do about it?

If you’re the pre-K/K teacher introducing letters and letter sounds to kids, there are two things you should really focus on, not only to prevent letter reversal, but also any kind of letter confusion: teaching directionality, and introducing letters by the type of stroke.

Directional tracking

Teaching letters and letter groups is not the same as teaching sight words.

It is expected that kids recognize the way a sight word looks (hence its name) – they look at it, they see it, they recognize it, and they know how to read it and what it means.

That’s not the way with letters and letter groups.

Kids have to know that they need to start from the left and move to the right, “sliding” their eyes through the letter(s) as they find them.

Groups of letters by the type of stroke

It is tempting to teach the alphabet in order, but that might generate more confusion as sometimes similar letters are super close in the alphabet (b/d, p/q)

We might think that introducing similar-looking letters at the same time is going to help prevent reversals, but most times it has the opposite effect.

When you teach the letter b first, for example, and give time for students to get familiar with it, offering many opportunities for them to practice the way it is written and the sound it makes, it’s less probable that they’ll confuse it with the letter d when you introduce it.

Teach the group of letters that begin with a stroke down: b, h, l, m, n, p, r, t.

Teach the group of letters that begin with a C stroke: c, a, d, g, o, q.

That way, b and d are taught separately as well as p and q.

If students come to you already knowing letters and sounds and knowing how to read, but they keep on reversing letters when writing, the best thing to do is to offer them lots of hands-on practice.

Some ideas:

give students a magazine page (or any text) and have them circle the letter b in red and the letter d in blue.
using magazines and newspapers, have them cut the letters b and d that they find and paste them on separate sheets of paper.
have them draw words that include the letters b and d on separate sheets of paper and then write the words, highlighting or underlining the letters b and d.
using a highlighter, write the letter b and d several times on a sheet of paper. Then, have kids write over the highlighted letters.