Comment ça s'écrit ?
Some reflections about teaching spelling in French.
Last weekend, I spent the day at ResearchEd Ballarat. As an education nerd, it’s like Christmas Day for me. It made it even better that my school was hosting it. I feel really proud and lucky to work at a school which values educational research to the extent that they host ResearchED annually. It is genuinely inspiring to work for leaders like Greg Ashman and Jen Bourke who talk the talk and walk the walk when it comes to instructional leadership. Amongst other things, thanks to them, I got to hear David Didau speak three times in three days.
This was my second ResearchEd and it was even better than the first. In fact, with over 700 attendees, it was the biggest ever in Australia and one of the biggest ResearchEDs in the world.
The thing I love most about attending conferences like this or just engaging with research in general is the way in which ideas or thoughts or others can quietly rearrange the way you think about something you deal with every day.
I attended keynotes by David Didau and Bron Ryrie-Jones and also some brilliant talks by Caiti Wade, Reid Smith, Katie Roberts-Hall and Sasha Laurence and Jessica Colleu Terradas.
I took something away from them all. As someone who tried - but ultimately failed - to change the professional learning culture in one of my previous schools, Caiti Wade’s session was particularly inspiring but also very triggering.
Another session that stuck an immense chord with me was Jessica Colleu Terradas’. Jess presented on her doctoral research at Australian Catholic University which explores spelling development and the role of morphological knowledge in literacy. I chose to attend this session because I was really keen to see how this could be applied to French spelling. I was also excited to learn that Jess is French and so would have a better handle than most on this. I managed to catch her at the end of the session and I look forward to connecting with her more on this topic.
As I listened to Jess talk through her research, my mind was constantly thinking about spelling in French.
It is something I have not really given much consideration to before, despite it being one of those perennial frustrations in the French classroom. Students often experience it as arbitrary. Teachers correct it endlessly. And progress can feel frustratingly slow.
There was one key idea in particular I took from Jess’ presentation. As Shaun Brien put it, ResearchED is “smart people saying smart things”.
The smart thing the smart person (Jess) said in this case was that spelling is not a single skill.
Rather, it is the coordination of several linguistic systems.
As Jess explained, when students spell a word, they are drawing simultaneously on phonology (sounds), orthography (letter patterns), morphology (how words are built), and lexis (their stored knowledge of words and meanings).
In other words, spelling is not simply memorisation.
It is a kind of linguistic problem-solving. Kind of like this below.
But when you start looking at French spelling through this lens, something interesting happens. Features that appear confusing at first start to reveal an underlying logic.
Phonology plays an obvious role. And as I have mentioned before students need to map the correct sounds onto graphemes. French complicates this relationship somewhat—many letters are silent and the same sound can be represented in several ways—but the sound system still provides an important starting point.
Orthography matters too. Over time, through repeated exposure to written language, learners begin to internalise the statistical patterns of the writing system. In an early iteration of the French curriculum at Michaela, Barry Smith and colleagues - as part of their CUDDLES process - would get the students to identify the consonants and vowel combinations and silent letters in words. Such techniques are about helping build students’ awareness of French orthographical patterns and develop stable mental representations of the language in memory.
But the aspect that particularly caught my attention in Jessica’s work was morphology: the study of how words are built from meaningful units such as roots, prefixes, and suffixes.
Morphological awareness helps learners recognise relationships between words. Once students see these relationships, spelling can start to feel less arbitrary.
French provides many examples of this.
As I was reflecting on how Jess’ work applies to French, it occurred to me that one of the reasons French spelling can feel strange to learners is that it often preserves morphological relationships between words, even when the pronunciation changes.
Here are some examples of this:
Petit → Petite
One can be forgiven for thinking that the t in petit appears unnecessary. It is not pronounced.
But the moment the word changes form, we preserve and pronounce that consonant:
petit
petite
petitesse
Jess’ discussion got me thinking about the base morphemes of words. And if we look at this group of words, the base morpheme is preserved across the word family. What looked like a silent letter turns out to be a clue about how the words are connected.
Grand → Grandeur
Similarly:
grand
grande
grandeur
The d is silent in grand, but it reappears in related forms. The spelling signals the relationship between the adjective and the noun.
Chant → Chanter → Chanteur
Another neat family:
chant
chanter
chanteur
chanson
Notwithstanding the slight shift, the spelling maintains the shared root related to singing. Once students recognise the base chant, a whole network of words becomes easier to decode and spell.
Dent → Dentiste → Dentaire
Another example:
dent
dentiste
dentaire
The spelling of the base remains stable even as suffixes are added. Recognising the root helps students spell unfamiliar words such as dentaire even if they have never written them before.
And this insight matters for teaching.
Teaching students these root patterns and helping them notice them does more than help students spell more accurately. It can also strengthen both reading and writing.
When students encounter unfamiliar words in a text, recognising the base can help them infer meaning. A learner who knows dent can often make a good guess at the meaning of dentiste or dentaire, even if they have never encountered those words before.
At the same time, morphological awareness expands students’ capacity to express themselves.
Instead of relying on a single familiar word, they begin to access a family of related expressions. A student who knows grand may later encounter grandeur. A student who knows chanter may recognise chanteur.
By knowing the adjective from the which the noun derives and vice-versa, students are able to potentially express the same idea in different ways.
And that matters.
Because one of the hallmarks of more advanced language use is precisely this flexibility: the ability to vary expression, to choose between related words, and to adapt language to context.
In that sense, helping students notice morphological families is doing more than improving spelling.
It is quietly expanding the range and sophistication of what they can say in writing or in speech.
Perhaps spelling errors, then, are not simply mistakes to correct.
They are signals.
Signals about what students have—or have not yet—noticed about the structure of the language.
And if we want students to become confident readers and writers of French, teaching students those structures may just be one of the most impactful things we can do.