How to teach phonics in MFL

Here are my top tips for teaching phonics in French, German and Spanish:

1. Have a phonics focus every fortnight

When I advise people on how to adapt their curriculum for the new GCSE (first exams 2026), the one thing I always mention is having an explicit phonics focus every couple of weeks. I can't tell you which one to do each time, because your vocabulary and grammar points will all be different, but as a general rule, start with something that is similar to an English sound, not too hard to pronounce and very common in the target language (TL). So, you could start with "j" in French, "ei" in German and "ll" in Spanish. These sounds are needed for the most basic phrase we tend to teach at the start of a foreign language course "my name is..." and can cause problems for some students throughout their language learning journey. 

2. The SSC caterpillar

Since I first shared this on my social media and during my phonics workshop back in October 2023, the SSC caterpillar has proven to be a hit across the country! The activity is very simple - display a cartoon caterpillar (see picture below for my example) and elicit a word that uses a recently taught sound (e.g. "ai" in French). Go around the class, asking for more words that feature the same sound, until the caterpillar is full.

One of my lovely Instagram followers recently contacted me to let me know that she had used the activity with her Year 7s and they loved it! She said: Just spent 5 minutes at the end of a lesson doing this with year 7 and they LOVED it! Really enjoyed it and going to make it a standard part of phonics retrieval going forward!

3. Dictation and read aloud pair activity

In the new GCSE, phonics will be explicitly tested in the listening and speaking exams, through a read aloud task (speaking) and a dictation task (listening). One way of practising these in lessons would be to do a pair work activity in which student A has the first half of a text, with gap-fills for the second half, and student B has the opposite. Student A reads the first half of the text aloud and student B fills in the gaps. Then switch. They can check each others' work and then work with the text in more depth, answering questions, translating it, using it as a writing frame, etc (as per my "exploiting one text" method).

Here is an example of how you could adapt a Spanish text:

There is a whole module about teaching phonics in my self-paced online course "Structuring an Outstanding MFL Lesson". Click here for more info.