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For many young learners, reading and writing can be one of the most challenging steps in their English learning journey. Even native speakers often find it difficult to understand the connection between how English is pronounced and how it is written.

Let’s explore how phonics can be a valuable and fun tool to help students and teachers understand this connection.

What is phonics?

Phonics is a method of teaching learners how to read by making the connection between sounds and letters. There are around 44 different sounds used in English, and around 120 different ways of writing them down.

Children learn to identify and say individual sounds (phonemes) and what letter or groups of letters can be used to write that sound down (graphemes). This helps children to read and spell words. For example, the /k/ sound is frequently written using these letters:

• k as in kite
• c as in cat
• ck as in back

When children learn to read using phonics, the sounds are read out in isolation, for example, b-a-ck. Then they are blended together to form the whole word: back.

How to teach phonics

Other methods of learning how to read and spell rely on students memorizing every new word they encounter – that’s potentially thousands of new words! On the other hand, phonics gives students the tools and confidence to read and spell unfamiliar words autonomously. If they know the sounds, they can read the word.

Simply drilling sounds and letters will quickly become dull for students, so here are some practical, fun phonics ideas you can try out in the classroom.

1. Use music

Music can create a positive atmosphere for teaching phonics, and it helps children to memorize sounds in a lively, enjoyable way. Furthermore, it can improve pronunciation and listening skills.

• Use musical instruments or clap to help students break words into individual sounds.
• Alternatively, use ‘robot talk’ – say the words in a robotic way, breaking up the words into their component sounds, for example ‘r-e-d’.
• Tongue twisters are useful for working on the initial sounds in words. Try creating tongue twisters using known vocabulary and students’ names, e.g. Sara sings in the sun.
• Many ELT courses provide phonics songs that practice new sounds. However, you can also adapt well-known songs to teach phonics.

Example song:

Clap your hands and turn around!

Put your hands up!
Put your hands down.
Clap your hands
And turn around!

Put your head up!
Put your head down!
Clap your hands
And turn around.

Put your leg up!
Put your leg down!
Clap your hands
And turn around.

2. Move your body

Learning through movement comes naturally to many young learners and can be a dynamic part of your phonics routine. Incorporating movement into your lessons can motivate students and help them retain the sounds and letters.

• Add an accompanying action when you present a new phonics sound and its corresponding letter/s. For example, say, ‘S, s, s, snake’ and make a snaking movement with your arm. The action becomes a visual prompt, so students call out ‘S!’ whenever you do the action.
• Air drawing can be great fun. Have students trace the shape of letters in the air with a finger while repeating the corresponding sound. This is also good pre-writing practice.
• You can even challenge students to work alone or in pairs to make letter shapes with their whole bodies!

3. Make phonics tactile

To really embed the connection between the shape of the letters and the sounds they represent, get children to use their hands to feel the shape of the letters while they repeat the sounds.

These tactile phonics activities have the added advantage of working on fine motor skills, which in turn will improve students’ handwriting.

• Show students how to trace the shape of the letter in a tray of sand while repeating the sound. Alternatively, try tracing the letter shape in shaving foam.
• Try modeling the letter shapes out of playdough or a piece of string.
• A fun pair-work game involves one student silently drawing a letter on their partner’s back. Their partner must guess the letter and say the sound.

4. Be creative

There are wonderful, creative ways you can explore phonics with your students. For younger students who don’t yet have the fine motor skills to write letter shapes, using arts and crafts can be an enjoyable way to reinforce the link between the letter/s and the sound.

• They could make letter shapes from dried pasta or use junk modeling.
• Have your students decorate letter shapes by painting, coloring, or collaging. This will help them memorize the shapes. Encourage them to repeat the sounds as they do this, or play a phonics rhyme in the background so the association between the sound and letter/s is constantly reinforced.

Create class displays for different sounds using a variety of pictures and objects starting with that sound. Use them for revision and classroom games. Try splitting the class into teams and then calling out a sound, or a word starting with that sound. The first team to touch the display with the matching letter/s wins a point.

5. Play games

Many popular ELT games can be adapted to teach phonics. Games are a great way to bring phonics to life and to give young learners the confidence to produce the sounds themselves.

• Play ‘Whispers’. Students sitting in a circle whisper a sound rather than a word to the child next to them until it reaches the end of the circle. The last child says the sound aloud, or points to the letters that correspond to that sound.
• Get children to create their own sets of cards with sounds and pictures on them. These can be used to play card games like snap and pairs.
• Other games such as i-spy, board rush games, bingo and lucky dip, can be easily adapted to teach phonics.

Whether you dedicate a whole lesson or just five minutes of your lesson to phonics, make sure to have fun!

If you’re an English teacher, Director of Studies or school owner you’ll know the importance of putting students in the right group. Whether it’s a business English class, exam prep or general English – a placement test is essential. Without one, you’ll teach classes with such varied levels and needs, it’ll be hard to plan an effective lesson.

Placing students at the wrong level will not only lead to unmotivated learners, but it may also cost your institution money.

But how exactly do you design a reliable, accurate and easy-to-use test? In this post, we’ll examine the key questions you need to consider before making your own placement test. We’ll also explore what features you need to achieve your goals.

Problems with traditional placement tests

Most private language schools (PLSs) and higher education institutions offer new students the opportunity to take a placement test before starting a course. However, these are often just a multiple-choice test, a short interview, or a combination of the two.

While this does act as a filter helping us group students into similar levels, there are a number of downfalls. Students can guess the answers to multiple-choice questions – and while they might give us a rough idea of their grammar knowledge, these tests don’t consider the four skills: speaking, writing, listening and reading.

Oral interviews, on the other hand, can give us an indication of the students’ spoken level. However, they also raise questions of objectivity and consistency that even specially trained teachers will struggle to avoid.

Another big issue with traditional tests is the amount of time they take. Multiple-choice exams are often graded by hand and interviewing every new student uses valuable resources that could be used elsewhere.

Key questions to consider

Before you re-design your current test completely, we’ve put together a series of questions to help you think about your objectives, define your needs and explore the challenges you may face.

Taking a few minutes to think about these things can make the process of finding the right English placement test go more smoothly and quickly. Once you know what you’re looking for, you’ll be ready to make a checklist of the most important features.

What will your test be used for?

• Placing incoming ESL students into the appropriate English language program.
• Measuring students’ progress throughout the school year.
• Final assessment of students' abilities at the end of the school year (“exit test”).
• All of the above.

Is this different from what you use your current test for? How soon are your needs likely to change?

What skills does your current test measure?

Does it measure speaking, listening, reading, writing, or all of the above? Are all of these skills measured in separate tests — or in one test?

• How many students do you need to test at each intake?
• How many students do you need to test each year? How many do you expect you’ll need to test in three years?

How quickly do you currently receive test results? How quickly would you like to receive them?

If you can test your students weeks before the start of the school term, you may have time to wait for results. However, if you are continuously testing students, or have students arriving just before the term begins, you may need to get results much more quickly.

What features in your current test do you like and dislike?

Are there things in your current test that you also want in your new test? Is anything missing, or anything that you don’t want your new test to have?

What resources are available to you?

Some English language tests require students to have the computer skills needed to take the test online. You may also need a testing lab that has the following:

• computers
• a stable internet connection
• a headset with a built-in microphone
• a preliminary checklist for placement tests.

Once you’ve got answers to the questions, you can use the checklist below to make sure your placement test has the features you need. It may also be useful for comparing products if you decide to use an external placement test.

A preliminary checklist for placement tests

What features do you need to achieve your goals?

Now that you've analyzed how you want to use your new English Placement test, create a checklist of the features that you need to achieve your goals.��

From sending emails and participating in conference calls to studying a masters degree or communicating on social media, in today’s globalized world, English is used by more and more non-native speakers in their daily lives.

For this reason, many schools, institutions and businesses now require their students or employees to have a minimum level of English. That’s why we need quick and efficient ways to test people’s proficiency and make sure they have the skills needed to communicate effectively.

This is where Versant tests come in. Our suite of four exams can be used to test various skills and competencies depending on the organization's needs. What’s more, they can be taken anywhere, at any time and the results are received instantly – making recruitment or enrollment a much smoother process.

This guide will help answer some questions you may have about the tests, and provide some links to useful resources.

What are the Versant tests?

The Versant tests are designed to measure an individual’s abilities in all or some of the four skills; speaking, writing, listening, or reading. They vary in length from between 17 to 50 minutes, and the results are available immediately afterwards.

There are four Versant products available, and they differ depending on which skills are considered most relevant to the candidates, or their places of work and study. It is possible to focus specifically on speaking or writing, for example, instead of a candidate’s entire skill set.

One thing which is consistent across all the tests is that they are fully automated, and can be delivered online or offline around the world at any time. The scores are then available immediately after finishing the test – so there will be no more agonizing waits for results!

In addition, other languages are also available in the testing suite; including Arabic, Dutch, French, Spanish and Aviation English.

Who are they for?

Organizations, institutions and corporations can use Versant tests to establish language proficiency benchmarks.

For businesses, they are a simple, reliable, and efficient tool for Human Resources (HR) departments to make sure their staff have the level required in the given language.

In an educational context, the tests are an excellent way for schools to place students within a certain program, to measure their progress and check their level at the end of a course to see if they are ready to move on.

What skills do they test?

The structure and content of the tests vary depending on which one you choose. Whichever one you select, all you need to take them is a computer, a reliable internet connection, and a headset with a built-in microphone. What’s more some of our speaking only tests (English, Spanish and French) can also be taken on your smartphone via the mobile app.

The Versant English Placement Test (VEPT) is the most thorough, taking 50 minutes in total. It focuses on speaking, listening, reading, and writing. The nine task types include reading aloud, repeats, sentence building, conversations, typing, sentence completion, dictation, passage reconstruction, along with providing a summary and opinion. This broad range of assessment is ideal for evaluating every aspect of a candidate’s language ability, from their pronunciation to their knowledge of grammar and complex language use.

But if this is too comprehensive for your needs, there are shorter, more focused alternatives:

The Versant English Test (VET) is a 17-minute assessment designed to evaluate speaking skills. This test can ensure that current or future employees meet the standard required to communicate effectively in a second language by assessing a student's sentence mastery, fluency, pronunciation, and vocabulary.

The Versant Writing Test (VWT) is a test of the candidate’s proficiency in writing skills. Taking approximately 35 minutes, the candidates are tested on their grammar, vocabulary, organization, register, and ability to read appropriate texts. Summarizing, taking notes, and responding to emails in a second language are key to many businesses nowadays, such as call centers. This test will allow companies to create a benchmark for their current and future employees related to specific writing skills.

The Versant 4 Skills Essential recognizes the growing need for people to be adept in all four language skills, even in entry-level jobs. Throughout this 30-minute web-based test, candidates undertake a variety of tasks including sentence formation, listening comprehension and written dictation.

Due to its short time limit, flexible web-based approach, and focused skill assessment, this suits fast-paced recruitment environments, helping to identify the best applicants as efficiently and accurately as possible.

What are the key features?

Once a candidate completes their test, a unique score report can be accessed immediately. This details a candidate’s performance in each stage, suggestions for improvement, and an overall CEFR or GSE score (or equivalent). This is thanks to our advanced speech and text processing technology. There is no need for a human examiner, which means scoring can be done instantaneously.

Moreover, thanks to the objective nature of this technology, results will be given without the potential bias of an examiner. This makes scores extremely reliable and consistent across a wide range of candidates.

VET also has concordances to TOEFL iBT and TOEIC. VEPT is also aligned to IELTS.

Finally, the ScoreKeeper administration tool is available with all Versant exams and allows businesses or educational institutions to manage the testing of all their candidates in one place. By using this, assigning tests, uploading rosters and exporting results can all be done remotely, regardless of a candidate's location.