Please note: this post was written in collaboration with Steve Smith of http://www.frenchteacher.net and Dylan Viñales of Garden International School Kuala Lumpur

1. What are decoding skills? Why are they important?

Decoding refers to the process of converting the written symbols (graphemes) of a language into sound (phonemes). Decoding skills are very important in language acquisition for a number of reasons.

The most important reason is the fact that when we acquire new vocabulary, we need to be able to pronounce it correctly if we plan to use it effectively through the oral medium. In this sense, the ability to convert the spelling of a word into its phonological form is a major component of autonomous language learning competence. This is particularly true for those learners who acquire a lot of their vocabulary through reading and not through oral interaction or exposure to aural input.

Another important reason refers to the ability to match the language the students have already learnt aurally, in their spoken form to their graphemic form. Take the very common scenario where a student who learns a French word in its phonological form only subsequently comes across the same word in its written form; if he lacks decoding skills the student is likely to fail to match the written form with its phonological representation with interpretive failure as a result. In this sense, lack of decoding skills can seriously impede reading comprehension of aurally acquired vocabulary thereby slowing down acquisition.

Thirdly, a recent study by Macaro and Erler (2008) has yielded a very interesting finding, i.e.:  a strong correlation between decoding ability and motivation to learn French. The researchers found that KS3 students who report high levels of self-efficacy and possess higher levels of proficiency in decoding skills are more likely to continue to study French at KS4.

2. Decoding – the neglected skill set

As a number of studies have reported, decoding is not taught explicitly in most UK schools. Erler (2003) studied 359 year 7 students of French using a written rhyme judgment task. The subjects exhibited very poor decoding skills (poor mastery of the pronunciation of main vowels sounds and their combinations and of silent consonants at the end of words).

Woore (2006) carried out a cross-sectional study investigating 94 Year 7 and 94 year 9 learners of French taught by the same teachers in the same school. His results echoed Erler’s (2003) and indicated that the progress in terms of decoding skills from Year 7 to Year 9, whilst statistically significant, were very slight.

Macaro and Erler’s (2008) studied 1735 students of French in Year 7, 8 and 9. They found that they failed nearly half of the correct rhyme judgment tasks they gave their subjects. A further indication that decoding skills are not effectively learnt at KS3.

Finally, Woore (2009) carried out a longitudinal study investigating the decoding skills of 85 KS3  learners of French. Woore asked his subjects to read aloud 53 unusual French words that the students were highly unlikely to have encountered before at two different points in time, i.e.  at the end of Year 7 and at the end of Year 8. Woore found that in both occasions the students decoding ability was very poor, suggesting that little had been learnt in two years of systematic French language instruction.

3. Conclusions and implications for MFL teachers

Many teachers do raise their learners’ awareness of the way graphemes are sounded in the target language. The teaching of decoding skills, however, is more than often neither explicit nor systematic. An occasional five minutes digression en passant on the pronunciation of a specific grapheme every now and then is not conducive to developing a ‘solid’ repertoire of decoding skills. For decoding skills to be acquired they have to be practised explicitly and systematically. This calls for conscious planning of decoding skills teaching in the MFL curriculum which addresses the very early stages of instruction.

Decoding skills instruction may include a synergy of the following:

• The systematic teaching of phonics;
• Instruction in the IPA (International Phonetic symbols);
• Micro-listening enhancers (for more microlistening enhancers see my two posts on these at: https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/2015/06/16/seven-micro-listening-enhancers-you-may-not-be-using-often-enough-in-your-lessons/ ; and https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/2015/08/18/more-micro-listening-enhancers-for-the-foreign-language-classroom/comment-page-1/ )

Decoding skills are often kept by teachers in their peripheral awareness due to a failure to consider how important they are in mediating vocabulary acquisition and memory activation . In this day and age, when MFL teachers have, more than ever, the ethical imperative of forging autonomous learners who can independently take advantage of the huge TL learning opportunities offered by the Internet, we must equip our students with sound decoding skills; without them, they will not be able to acquire the most important level of the communicative power of TL words.

The literature concisely reviewed above exposes a tragic reality: entire cohorts of students who, after two years of instruction exhibit a dispiriting low mastery of the basic decoding skills. And when the researchers investigated the root causes of the phenomenon, it came down to one and only one issue: erratic teacher commitment to this very important area of TL learning; decoding skills were taught explicitly only when the textbook made reference to them.

One of my teaching and learning resolutions this year is to focus as much as possible on decoding skills with my primary and Year 7 classes. I will test some of my students in the first term and at the end of year using the RAT (read aloud test) that Woore (2009) employed in his study to see if there will have been any improvements. Here are the very unusual words Woore (2009) selected for their read aloud test.

Woore’s (2009) Words included in the RAT

Cinglant  jouxter thonier maçonne dédain gueulez soudain haubert guingois poitrine museau duraille chacun ferreux obtient ralingue piochais veilleur lancée sainfoin loquet poignard traçant trémie peigner embruns peinait Hongrie giclée caleçon acanthe marteaux goinfrez lugeur houblon moineau vaurien maquille thibaude jaugez noceur liégeois quignon enfuie jonchée bêcheuse ougrien huilage

Every assessment we carry out in an MFL classroom ought to have a positive washback effect on learning. In this post I argue that with pre-intermediate to intermediate students the way MFL learners are typically assessed does not impact learning as much as it ought to, due to a failure to consider the complex nature of oral skill acquisition and the cognitive demands it poses on learners.

What I mean is that most often learners are assessed using complex multi-traits or holistic scales which are designed to rate their performance across a number of dimensions of proficiency such as fluency, intelligibility,  grammatical accuracy, pronunciation, complexity, range of vocabulary, ability to comprehend and respond to an interlocutor, etc. However, this approach has the potential to have a negative washback effect on learning when we deal with novice to intermediate learners due to the huge cognitive demands it puts on them.

This is because, as I have often reiterated in my posts, at this level of proficiency foreign language learners struggle to cope effectively with all of the demands posed by oral production in real operating conditions. Hence, by assessing them using multi-traits or holistic scales which assess simultaneously all of the above components of oral proficiency we are being hugely unfair to them, as we are not taking into account how finite their cognitive resources are.

Although there is indeed a place for a more multi-dimensional type of assessment in high-stake tests (e.g. end of unit tests), when it comes to the all-important low-stake tests we should administer throughout the learning cycle, I advocate a different approach which takes into account developmental factors in the acquisition of cognitive control, i.e. a type of assessment which focuses on one or maximum two traits at a time. For instance, at one key stage in the unfolding of a unit of work one would focus on the assessment of fluency + intelligibility of output; at another one would focus on range of vocabulary and pronunciation; etc. Obviously, your students will be informed at all times as to which trait will constitute the focus of the forthcoming assessment; this will channel their cognitive resources in one or two directions thereby pre-empting the risk of them chasing too many rabbits at the same time and ending up catching none.

This approach, which I have been using for years, not only has the advantage of focusing the learners on one aspect of cognitive control over oral production at the time – with an obvious positive washback effect on learning; but addresses another important pitfall of oral performance assessment carried out using complex multi-traits scales: the cognitive overload such scales cause oral test raters. Unless raters record the students’ oral performances and listen to them over and over again after the test– which rarely happens with low-stake assessments – complex assessment scales are very likely to cause divided attention, as it is extremely challenging to attend to speaker output and evaluate it at the same time across all of the traits and criteria.

In this sense, low-stake speaking tests assessed using a narrow focus approach do kill two birds with one stone. On the one hand, they optimize the use of the student’s cognitive resources; on the other, they facilitate the test-rater’s task. I will add another advantage I have experienced whilst using this approach, which refers to my professional development: by focusing on a different aspect of oral proficiency at a time for each low-stake assessment one gains a higher level of awareness vis-à-vis the variables affecting its development than one would normally do when focusing on several oral proficiency components at the same time.

It goes without saying that in high-stake assessments the use of multi-traits or holistic rubrics is more useful as we do want to have a more comprehensive view of how our students are faring along all the major components of oral proficiency. However, I do feel that many of the holistic and analytical scales adopted by MFL teachers with novice to intermediate speaker learners share a common shortcoming, which has a detrimental washback effect on learning: they do not lay enough emphasis on fluency and on the ability to effectively comprehend and respond to an interlocutor. In their quest for comprehensiveness and for a ‘one fits all’ solution, they fail to consider that each level of proficiency has different developmental features and should therefore be approached differently in terms of assessment. The more novice the learner the more skewed towards fluency the scale should be, the emphasis on accuracy and complexity gradually increasing as we progress further along the language acquisition continuum.

As a follow-up to my post ‘Micro-listening enhancers you may not be using in your foreign language lessons’ here is a new list of micro-listening enhancers I frequenty use in my lessons.

1. Parallel sentences

I usually read out – or record myself or a native-speaker reading out – ten or more sets of two semi-identical sentences, which differ only slightly, at native speaker speed. For instance, in the example below the difference will be ‘vers’ (around) vs ‘à’ (at). The students have to identify the differences and note them down on mini-boards. I am not at all bothered with the spelling of the target word.

Je suis allée au cinéma vers huit heures

Je suis allée au cinéma à huit heures  

2. Sudden stop

I give students a transcript of a listening text, then play or read the text at native speed, suddenly stopping when I feel fit. The students write on mini-boards the last word I uttered.

3. Spot the wrong sound

I pronounce a target language sentence or short text making sure that I make a typical L1 transfer phonetic error. For instance, in the sentence below, I would pronounce the ‘h’ the English way. The students need to identify my pronunciation mistake.

J’habite en Malaisie

4. Spot the correct transcription

The teacher reads out a sentence at near native speed. The students are provided with a gapped version of that sentence and with three near-homophones (words that sound very similar). The task is to choose the correct option.

Teacher says : J’y vais avec lui

Students see (on screen/whiteboard) : J’y vais avec _______

Options to choose from : Louis – lui – l’huile

5. Sound-tracking

Students are given a short target language text. The teacher reads a sound, for instance /wa/ (as in ‘moi’) and the students, under time conditions, have to scan the text in search for any letter or combination of letters that refer to that sound and highlight them.

6. Silent letters (group work)

Students are given a set of sentences and, working in group, take turns to read them out to each other, circling the letter they think will not be voiced. The teacher then provides the answers to confirm or not the students’ assumptions.

7. Break the flow

This is a classic. Students are presented with sentences (on whiteboard/screen) written out as shown below, with no spacing between words. The teacher will utter the sentence two or three times at native speed and the students will have to rewrite the sentences with the appropriate spacing

What students get: Jenefaispasdesportcarjesuisparesseux (=I do not do sport because I am lazy)

What they are meant to do: je ne fais pas de sport car je suis paresseux

8. Anagrams

Students are given a set of anagrams of words they have never come across before which the teacher will pronounce one by one two or three times. Based on the target sound – which will have been practised beforehand – the students will have to rewrite the words in their accurate form. I like this exercise because, when the words are truly unfamiliar, it does require a good grasp of TL phonology and inferential skills.

9. IPA practice – back-transcription

This is meant as training in the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA. After much work on phonological awareness and practice and teaching of the IPA equivalent of each target sound (e.g. oi = /wa/; en= / ɑ̃ /) the students are presented with a list of phonetic transcription of words which I usually get from www.wordreference.com. Their task is to write them back in their normal graphemic form.

What students are given: [mwa], [pɑ̃dɑ̃], etc.

The correct answers: moi, pendant, etc.

10. IPA practice – IPA transcription

This is best done after extensive practice with the previous activity and with the IPA symbols in general. The teacher utters a series of words and students write them out on white boards using the symbols provided. Sheets with the target IPA symbols can be given to students as scaffolding. A tip: do not deal with too many symbols at any one time and keep the words as short as possible

1. To facilitate and ‘speed up’ the development of speaking proficiency – as Levelt’s model of first language speaking production posits (see picture 1, below), spoken output requires the orchestration of many complex processes, some more complex than others, but all placing serious demands on our brain, in terms of processing efficiency. The speech production process starts in the conceptualizer that generates ideas and ‘sends’ them to the formulator which translates them into meaningful and grammatically correct sentences; then the monitoring system steps in checking the output accuracy before any sentence is uttered; finally, the articulator will orchestrate the use of the larynx, pharynx and mouth organs, whilst the monitoring system will have been overseeing speech production every step of the way.This process becomes even harder when the ideas generated by the brain (in the conceptualizer) need to be translated into speech in real time in a foreign language; the whole process slows down considerably – hence the hesitations and pauses in our language learners, even the more advanced ones, when speaking in the target language; and their errors, due more to cognitive overload than to carelessness (unless by ‘carelessness’ we mean lack of effective monitoring).

Picture1–Levelt’s model of language production (adapted from: http://homepage.ntlworld.com)

The complexity of the language production process and the challenges of performing it in a foreign language mean that our Working Memory has to juggle simultaneously all of the tasks that speaking involves and may lead less expert L2 speakers, as already mentioned, to slow down production and make mistakes due to processing efficiency. Hence, foreign language learners need to learn to master the lower order skills, i.e. effective control over larynx, pharynx and articulators  as early as possible in order to ‘free up space’ in Working Memory for the kind of cognitive processing that happens in the conceptualizer and formulator; this will allow Working Memory to work more efficiently and focus only on the higher order skills, i.e.: the negotiation and creation of meaning, the transformation of meaning into the target language vocabulary, the application of grammar rules and self-monitoring.

Consequently, if we do not foster the automatization of pronunciation earlier on, through regular practice, we will delay our students’ development as fluent speakers. I have experienced this often in the past on taking on Year 7 classes which had been given very little pronunciation and/or speaking practice during two years of French/Spanish in Primary. Is this an argument against the Comprehensible Input hypothesis or The Silent way? Maybe.

2.Fossilization – On the other hand, if we plunge L2 learners into highly demanding oral tasks too soon, without focusing long and hard enough on pronunciation through easy and controlled tasks, their Working Memory will  have less monitoring space for sound articulation, as they will focus on the generation of meaning (i.e. what happens in picture 1’s conceptualizer) with potentially ‘disastrous’ consequences for  their pronunciation , in that they will resort to their first language phonological encoding to produce the target language sounds (language transfer). If pronunciation errors due to this issue will keep slipping into performance lesson after lesson, oral practice after oral practice, the mistakes will become fossilized and carried over to later stages of proficiency as fossilized errors tend to be impervious to correction.

3.Phonological encoding affects recall – the more the learners become versed in the articulation of the target language sounds, the faster and more effective will be their retention of target language words in their Long-term memory (encoding). Why? This is because of the limitations of the ‘phonological encoding device’ in our brain’s Working Memory, i.e.: the articulatory loop (see picture 2 below). The articulatory loop has limited space (or channel capacity as psycholinguists call it), hence, if a word is not pronounced ‘fast enough’ the brain may not simply be able to encode it. The faster the articulatory loop ‘pronounces’ the target language the easier it will be (a) to memorize new words, especially longer and more challenging ones (from a phonological point of view) and (b) for Working Memory to process longer units of language (phrases/sentences) – as the less space words take on in the articulatory loop the greater the chances will be for longer words to be held in Working Memory at any one time. This speeds rehearsal in Working Memory and, consequently, uptake as well retrieval and production.

 Picture 2 – adapted from: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/vivian.c/SLA/STM.htm

4. Stigmatizing output may lead to simpler L2-input from L2-native speakers – I am not a fan of Stephen Krashen but I do admit that he has come up with some great ideas, such as Narrow Listening and the one that relates to the point I am about to make; the fact, that is, that if a beginner/intermediate learner has bad pronunciation, any L2 expert who will interact with him/her may actually send easier L2 linguistic input his/her way presuming that his/her level of proficiency and/or language aptitude – as signaled by his/her pronunciation – is low. This will have negative implications for  learning as if you are exposed to simplified input when you are at the early stages of language learning you may not learn much from it, not enough to bring you to next level, so to speak.

I tend to agree with Krashen on this one as I have seen this happen several times. And I will add, that often, in naturalistic environments, something even worse may occur: L2 native speakers may avoid engaging in conversations with L2 non-native speakers with poor pronunciation, for fear of not being understood or not understand and having going through the awkward process of asking the interlocutor to repeat.

 5. The critical age hypothesis – This applies only to the first years of Primary school, when children are 5 to 8 years old (or younger); the age, that is, where the sensory-motor skills which control the movement of the larynx, pharynx and the articulators are still ‘plastic’, i.e. amenable to modification. After that age, it seems that the child’s receptiveness to pronunciation modelling/instruction diminishes drastically. If this is true, as compelling recent research evidence suggests, it is at this age that learners must be focused on pronunciation and taught ‘phonics’, pretty much as happens in their first language lessons, through fun and engaging speaking activities, lots of singing, listening and computer assisted phonetic learning.