This is a 4-year PhD project being run by Courtney Hooton and is supervised by Professor Jessie Ricketts, Dr Kaili Rimfeld and Dr Saloni Krishnan. The aim this project is to look at the role of orthography when teaching new foreign vocabulary in primary school Modern Foreign Language lessons, and to then assess the feasibility, acceptability and effectiveness of implementing the use of orthography in the classroom. This project consists of four studies:
Study 1: A systematic review identifying effective techniques in teaching new foreign vocabulary to children and how orthography has been used in such studies. Click here to read the pre-registration
Study 2: A series of observations and teacher surveys to assess how orthography is currently used in the primary school languages classroom and what teachers perceptions of the use of orthography are. Click here to read the pre-registration.
Study 3: An experimental word learning study where teachers will teach French words to whole classes and the presence of orthography will be manipulated between classes.
Study 4: The findings from the previous 3 studies will be used to inform a more naturalistic word learning study. We will collaborate with teachers throughout the design process and we will then run the study in the classroom, assessing the effectiveness, feasibility and acceptability of these methods in classroom practice.