Teaching French phonics isn’t simple because the French language has many sounds and sometimes different ways to write the same sounds.
That’s not easy by itself.
Now, if you’re teaching kids whose first language is English, you’ve got a whole other layer of challenge to tackle.
Things to consider when teaching French phonics to anglophone students
I’d say there are at least four things you should keep in mind when teaching French phonics to your anglophone kids.
But before we get started, I just want you and I to get super clear on the meaning of some words I’m going to use in this post.
Grapheme: letters that represent a phoneme in writing. In other words, the way you write a sound. For example, in the word ” mouton”, there are four graphemes, one for each sound: m, ou, t, on.
Phoneme: the actual unit of sound. To follow up on the example above, the word “mouton” has four phonemes: /m/, /u/, /t/, /ɔ̃/.
Now that we’ve got that cleared up, let’s move on and talk about things you want to consider when teaching French phonics.
1) French has phonemes that either don’t exist or are super rare in English.
The same way it might be hard for French speakers to learn the th /θ/ sound in English, it’s tough for English speakers to master some of the sounds in French.
For example, the palatal nasal sound gn /ɲ/ as in “agneau”.
What does that mean for you as a teacher?
Well, you’ve got to consider this when planning the order you’ll be introducing French sounds to your anglophone students. You might want to start with the sounds that are the same in both languages, such as some vowel sounds and most consonant sounds. Then, move on to unique French sounds.
2) There are English and French graphemes that look the same, but sound different.
Some English graphemes look exactly the same as the ones in French. But they sound different.
For example, the grapheme th corresponds to the phoneme /θ/ in English, but corresponds to the phoneme /t/ in French: a theater / un théâtre.
Another one is the ain in “pain in my leg” and “je mange du pain“.
For you, this means that your kiddos might “transfer” some of the English pronunciation to their pronunciation of French words. Just make sure your students, particularly the younger ones, understand that the same letters don’t necessarily sound the same in both English and French.
3) Sometimes one French phoneme can be represented by many different graphemes.
Sure that happens in other languages as well, including English. Think of the phoneme /aʊ/ which can be represented by the grapheme ou (as in cloud) or ow (as in cow) in English.
But you’d have to agree with me that having a French phoneme such as /ɛ/ that can be represented in French by six graphemes I can think of might be a bit overwhelming for kids to understand and learn.
You can find the sound /ɛ/ as è (règle), ê (fenêtre), et (robinet), ai (chaise), ei (neige), and even e (the first e in princesse)!
For you, the teacher, it means it might sometimes get tricky for your students to decode some words.
4) It’s obvious, but French has accented letters while English doesn’t.
First, students need to get used to the sight of accents in words.
Second, they have to learn how the accents sometimes change the pronunciation of the letters they’re attached to. So e, é, and è make different sounds.
Finally, they also have to realize that some accents don’t change anything at all. For example, the grapheme et already sounds like /ɛ/, so you wouldn’t really need an ˆ (accent circonflexe) over the e in forêt, but still there it is! Just as a note, the accent in forêt is there to replace an s from Old French.
See how accents might be tough for anglophone kiddos to understand?
I’m pretty sure you already knew all that, even if it were more like an intuition, but still it’s refresh and remember.
We tend to forget how we learned what we learned, and how it was not knowing what we know now.
So that’s what I wanted to share with you today!
Are there other things you pay attention to when teaching French phonics to anglophone students?
Leave me a comment below.
Thank you for stopping by!
Merci!
Lucy 🙂
Read: French Phonics 101 – going over the basics
If you’re looking for other French phonics resources to use in your classroom, check out the resources here (click and scroll down).
