Knowing the consistency between sounds and letters is the key to reading (Blevins, 1988). Adam (1990) argued that skillful readers read words automatically, unambiguously manipulating phonology and orthography by phonological decoding.
Native speakers, who have never received literacy tuition like phonics instruction, tend to lack an understanding of the relationships between sounds and letters. The inability to recognize orthographic units makes them illiterate. Consequently, phonics instruction is used to cultivate learners’ competence in decoding phonemes and orthographic units accurately. When they are able to blend and segment speech sounds, their reading competence increased (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005).
Phonics Instruction in Taiwan
English is an alphabetic language, so developing the ability to perceive and produce speech units is important for beginning learners. When learners are able to master the speech sounds, they can sound out orthographic units and recognize their meaning. In Taiwan, phonics has been employed for pronunciation instruction in elementary schools since 1994. Even junior high school teachers utilize phonics instruction to enhance students’ phonemic awareness (Huang, 2002). Elementary school students receive phonics instruction to know the consistency of letters and sounds, and develop phonemic awareness through identifying, blending, or
segmenting speech units. When they learn phonics, they can sound out printed words
instantly. For example, it is easy for learners to pronounce “bag” with their
phonological decoding ability. Phonics instruction facilitates the production of speech units from knowledge of letter-sound representations. Thus, by knowing the rules of phonics, they can spell or read, immediately. The instruction adheres to Gilbert’s spelling system (2001), which states certain rules, like when there are two vowel letters in a stressed syllable, the first one is produced its alphabet sound while the latter one is silent, for example /o/ as in boat, or /e/ as in take. Therefore, when there is no need for learners to learn another linguistic system for pronunciation, they are more confident in learning English (Chang, 2000; Yi, 1997). Through studies on phonics instruction, Chang (2003) declared that students’ word recognition and
spelling had improved after receiving this teaching. Hsu (2015) indicated that students outperformed themselves in spelling and oral reading and developed a positive
attitude towards learning English after receiving 15-weeks of phonics instruction.
Consequently, it was deduced that phonics instruction enhances learners’
pronunciation and confidence.
Limitations of Phonics
Kreidler (1972) stated that the English spelling system was too complicated for learners to predict the speech sounds from orthographic units, since the relationship between sound and letter was inconsistent. One letter may have multiple phonemes,
such as the letter “a” in call, boat, apple, and mate; or one phoneme may be
represented in multiple letters: such as /I/ in bit, minute, and woman. In the following pairs: allow//swallow and imply//simply, each pair seems to rhyme, but in actually, it does not. Hence, English learners have trouble mapping sounds and letters (Glushko, 1979; Kreidler, 1972). Kenworthy (1989) outlined some rules about the sound values of consonants and vowels, for example, “c” can be /k/ as in cat or /s/ as in city , or
“ph” can be /f/ as in phone. In addition, the major value of “ee” is /i/ as in see, and the minor value of “ee” is /I/ as in been. The vast number of phonics rules and substantial rote learning burden beginning learners, and make English learning boring and nonsensical. Wang (1985) pointed out that phonics instruction helped learners produce monosyllabic words effortlessly, but did not equip them to sound out polysyllabic words correctly. Moreover, learners could not identify the stressed syllable in a multisyllabic word, or correctly pronounce the words borrowed from French, Greek, or any other language (Yang, 2003). Dai (2003) indicated that the existence of too many irregular words, confuse learners’ prediction of the correct pronunciation of a new word. The proportion of irregular words is 60% among the 300 high-frequency English words as well as 25% in the 10,000 high-frequency English words. Consequently, learners have to memorize many irregular rules. Since the relationship between letters and sounds is intricate, it is never easy for learners to
sound out printed words effectively and unambiguously. Though phonics helps
learners predict the correct pronunciation of words 80% of the time, learners still have problems during the remaining 20% (Chang, 2004; Wang & Wen, 2011).When
learners read a 100-word article, they may mispronounce 20 words and misunderstand the meaning of the lines. Wu (2004) declared that receiving phonics instruction does not significantly enhance the ability of EFL junior high school students to decode vocabulary, or pronounce multisyllabic words correctly. A study by Hung (2004) showed that students could not manipulate complicated word pronunciation rules only with phonics instruction. Though most junior high school students have acquired phonics instruction in elementary schools, when they encounter polysyllabic
vocabulary, they are unable to sound it out immediately; they usually need assistance to decipher the correct pronunciation of the word. Consequently, though phonics instruction develops learners’ phonological abilities and enables them to read rule-governed words aloud, there are, apparently, still some inconsistences.
Phonetics Instruction
Because of the intricate relationship between letters and sounds, EFL learners require a substantial amount of information to comprehend English speech sounds thoroughly. Morley (1975) indicated that phonetics has the most significant, visual features to represent abstract phonemes and aid learners in mastering the sound
system. Celce-Murcia et al. (2011) noted that the phonetic alphabet is a system to help learners grasp the speech units of a target language more accurately, because there is one-to-one correspondence between the symbol and the sound it represents.
Ladefoged (2006) argued that phonetics, a linguistic tool, is not only useful, but also important for learners to transcribe speech sounds, visually and aurally.
Phonetic symbols help learners recognize the consistency between orthographic units and speech sounds. With phonetics, learners are able to perceive the sound of a printed word and pronounce it accurately. Simultaneously, they are also able to recognize the word and acquire its meaning effectively.
Figure 2. Process of Word Recognition
Note. Modified from “Reading Acquisition, Developmental Dyslexia, and Skilled Reading Across Language: A Psycholinguistic Grain Size Theory,” by J. C. Ziegler and U. Goswami, 2005, Psychological Bulletin, 131(1), p. 4. Copyright 2005 by the American Psychological Association.