Alphabet fun

When I first began teaching back in 1485* I never taught the alphabet to classes. My thinking at the time was that memorising the letters of French in order was not much use when it came to developing proficiency. To start with it's not a skill you ever need, unless someone asks you to read out the letters of the alphabet in order. That doesn't happen too often. I changed my mind over the years and saw chanting the alphabet as a first, fun step towards learning the practical skill of spelling out words, for example one's own name. That's a useful real-life skill. What I failed to explicitly realise is that using the letters of the alphabet is a good way to help pupils develop phonological skill. (I think I probably realised it implicitly because I always hated it when I heard other classes pronouncing the letters poorly.)

So most teachers teach the alphabet early on to beginners since spelling out words is a useful real-life skill, but it also serves to practise the new phonemes of the language.

Here are a few fun activities teachers have told us they do with the alphabet. Some I used myself, some I saw colleagues use, others I have picked up through reading.

• Sing the alphabet to familiar tune, e.g. a US army marching song, Camptown Races, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star or the theme to Eastenders (a series familiar to UK students). Repeat any letters as necessary to go fit with the tune.
 • Who can guess the word first as I spell it out to you? You could use the names of students in the class or, say, the names of target language country cities.
 • Sing along with YouTube alphabet songs. Alain Le Lait is a good start for French. You could play three such songs to the class, asking them to pick out their favourite to use repeatedly. In doing this they begin to pick up the sounds implicitly.
 • Make up or find an optician’s sight testing chart containing letters of different sizes. Use this for repetition practice.
 • Display letters in rows with each row sharing a same phoneme, e.g. in French b, c, d, g, (all sharing the é sound.
• Have students make up an alphabet rap or sing along with one on YouTube.
 • Have students finger-write in the air on a partner’s back as you read aloud letters.
 • Design a ‘join the dots’ picture, but use letters rather than dots. Read out the right sequence of letters for students to draw the picture.
• Tell students to ‘have a conversation’ in pairs just using letters, gestures and intonation. Provide them with characters to use, e.g. a giant’s voice or a mouse voice. Tell them to introduce emotions such as sadness, anger or mirth.
 • ‘Beat the Teacher’: display the alphabet on the board, point at a letter and say it; if you are correct the students repeat chorally, if you are wrong they remain silent.

* cf. Fawlty Towers

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