Foreign Language Education: Unlocking Reading (FLEUR) - A study into the teaching of reading to beginner learners of French in secondary school

A sense of making progress at the start of Year 7 is crucial to sustaining motivation and hence enabling further progress in Modern Foreign Languages (Graham, Courtney, Tonkyn andamp; Marinis, 2016). In particular, learners need to rapidly develop the foundation literacy skills essential at Key Stage 3 and 4, as well as a sense of self-efficacy or confidence to enable them to persevere with language learning. Our study therefore aimed to strengthen the evidence base on which teachers can draw when teaching reading in Year 7 Modern Foreign Languages (MFL), with a focus on French as the most widely taught language in England at the start of secondary school. We explored two approaches to teaching reading in MFL, namely explicit phonics instruction and explicit reading strategy instruction. Phonics instruction means teaching students about the relationships between the written symbols of the language and the spoken sounds they represent, helping them to ‘sound out’ written words in order to be able to pronounce them accurately. Reading strategy instruction means teaching students how to use particular strategies to help them comprehend written text more effectively – for example, how to deduce the meaning of an unfamiliar word based on its context in a written passage. We also investigated whether any benefits of such explicit instruction was actually due to that instruction itself, or whether the same outcomes could be achieved simply through giving students practice in tackling more challenging reading texts. We aimed to investigate what impact these three approaches (Strategies, Phonics and Texts only) might have on learners’ reading comprehension, their ability to match the sounds of words to their written form (phonological decoding), their vocabulary knowledge, their strategic behaviour while reading French, their self-efficacy or confidence in reading French, and their broader motivation for learning the language. Finally, we also wished to know how learners and teachers felt about the kinds of instruction used. We found that all three groups made strong progress in French reading, with no one group doing significantly better than the others. We believe that the challenging texts themselves may have fostered students’ progress. However, there were also some advantages for the Phonics and Strategies groups over the Texts-only group. The Phonics group made more progress in their knowledge of the sounds of written French. Both the Strategies group and, especially, the Phonics group, also learnt more new vocabulary over the course of the study. Learners in all three groups, but especially the Strategies group, became more confident in reading challenging texts in French. We conclude that an integrated approach to teaching French reading – combining explicit instruction in both Strategies and Phonics with the use of appropriately challenging, engaging texts – is likely to be more beneficial than any of these approaches in isolation.