Phonics - Reviewing our Curriculum in the light of the Ofsted Research Review

 This is one of a series of posts looking at the implications of the Ofsted Research Review for our KS3 Curriculum. In a previous post on the issues raised around Transition, I stressed that we are not intending to make any squealing hand-brake turns, and as I have posted before, the area of Phonics is one where we have already been making strides, so perhaps this is the opportunity for a slight nudge on the tiller.

Here are the issues from the Ofsted Research Review which I highlighted in our department discussion document:

Explicitly teaching the sound-spelling patterns and the link between the two.

Planned revisiting of the sound-spelling patterns.

Focus on small changes of sound/spelling producing differences in meaning.

Reading aloud, dictation, testing - including unknown or made up words.

I am going to focus here on our main language taught from Year 7, which is French. We are confident that we do teach the sound/spelling patterns thoroughly at the start of Year 7. We use Dr Rachel Hawkes'/Comberton Village College's Francophoniques, with keywords and actions. Having the actions is good fun with a new Year 7 class, and maybe helps them learn the sound/spelling. But it also means that a teacher can use the action to anticipate or correct a mispronunciation using the action to prompt the pupil to say the word correctly without the teacher having to model it out loud. For example using the poisson action learned in Year 7 to help a Year 9 pupil pronounce coiffeur correctly.

The first issue we need to look at here is whether we cover all the sounds - in particular, un / une  is missing, and maybe other ways a word can be modified, for example bon / bonne. These are currently taught as grammar points, but it would be best to pre-empt this in the phonics teaching ready for when they are met grammatically.

This leads on to the point about the focus on small changes and when this results in a different meaning. One aspect of this is about accuracy of pupils' knowledge of the sound-spelling link. Are they accurate in distinguishing between dent and dont ? But the other aspect of linking it to meaning is trickier. Is there a pronunciation difference between dent and dans ?  And in Listening, the difference between jouer, joué, joués, jouée, jouées, jouez and jouet and jouets is only discernable through meaning and grammar.

Are we really going to micro plan these as part of phonics? Or should we continue to work on a solid basis of all the key sounds, so that when we get to the grammar of the difference between joué and jouais, the sounds are already in place, so the grammar teaching can take over. I think that after the initial blitz on phonics for pronuniciation in Year 7, it's in Listening that we will pick up on the finer distinctions. Pupils seem to find dictation more challenging than reading aloud.

I am hoping that NCELP materials will also help us to top up pupils' awareness of sound and spelling patterns. Either resources from the NCELP site or videos from Oak Academy based on NCELP's work. This will help us to do more to revisit (as called for by the Ofsted Research Review) and will also pick up on fine distinctions of sound, spelling, meaning and grammar. I hope.

On the other hand, I don't want to just be ticking boxes for the sake of it. After the explicit work on phonics in Year 7, I think there are also more subconscious processes at work. I am happy that our pupils can read aloud, they can tackle a Keep Talking sheet (Why I don't call them Sentence Builders) or learn new words without having to drill the pronunciation. And the number of rules that have to be internalised to read correctly, fluently and with a good accent is phenomenal. Sounds, elision, silent letters, exceptions... So much so that I don't think it is done by conscious and deliberate application of a rule. Exposure to lots of language, written and spoken, can take over once the basics have been done. And it is working, because when I go into a Year 9 class, I can see their confidence in reading aloud in French. And I can spot the ones whose Year 7 teacher really concentrated on phonics early on.

From our KS3 curriculum review

So I think that rather than being distracted by the Ofsted Research Review, we should keep an eye on
issues we have identified for ourselves. Firstly, because it is done early in Year 7, it is vulnerable when we have staffing changes. New teachers getting settled in to a new school and new ways of doing things, may not be up and running with teaching the phonics quite as we would like. And perhaps lockdown and then the Covid restrictions on chanting and pairwork have meant that the current cohort of pupils have not developed their phonics awareness as much as we should like. So we need to work on consistency across the department, resources to support new staff (I made videos of the sounds/spellings/pictures/actions in lockdown), and revisiting phonics either with our key words and actions, or with NCELP materials.

So far the Ofsted Research Review has been a good stimulus for reviewing our curriculum, without being too controversial. Stand by for posts on Vocabulary, Grammar, Communication and Culture, Assessment and Feedback, and Target Language Teaching. Could get exciting!