“Pronounced Empowerment?”: An analysis of the impact of an explicit multi sensory phonics teaching intervention on the pronunciation skills and motivation levels of KS4 pupils of French

Abstract

Numerous recent studies have found that UK secondary school pupils of French typically have poor ability in “decoding” this language. That is, they struggle to correctly pronounce the language when seen in its written form. It has been contended that pupil lack of confidence in this area may be contributing to low levels of motivation for the subject. A common support strategy for pupils experiencing difficulties with spelling-sound links in their first language is the use of multisensory teaching activities. This study outlines and analyses an intervention trialling multisensory teaching of French phonics with a class of KS4 pupils. The findings suggest that multisensory teaching could well be effective in improving pupils’ foreign language decoding ability. There is some evidence that explicit spelling-sound link teaching can empower pupils to feel more in control of decoding processes generally. However, this appears to have little impact on wider levels of subject motivation