字母拼讀法對音韻覺識的影響研究

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(1)國立台灣師範大學英語研究所碩士論文 Master Thesis Graduate Institute of English National Taiwan Normal University. 字母拼讀法對音韻覺識的影響研究. The Effects of Explicit Phonics Instruction on the Development of Phonological Awareness. 指導教授：陳純音博士 Advisor: Dr. Chun-Yin Doris Chen 研究生：許婉琳 Student: Wanlin Sheu. 中華民國九十七年六月 June, 2008.

(2) ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The composing process of this thesis is an enduring journey, and it would never have been completed without the help of many amazing people that have encouraged and accompanied me. I have been extremely indebted in the preparation of this thesis to my supervisor, Dr Chun-Yin Doris Chen of our department, whose patience, kindness, guidance as well as her academic experience, have been invaluable to me. Despite her tight schedule, she always made sure she had urged me to keep up with the writing pace as well as offering me warm encouragement throughout the composing journey. My sincere gratitude also goes to the committee members, Dr. Eileen Chen of National Taipei University of Education and Dr. Chieh-Fang Hu of Taipei Municipal University of Education for their valuable ideas and suggestions. Their advices surely have made my thesis a better piece. The help of the teachers and students in Beisin Elementary school have also been most helpful. Without their participation, this thesis would never have been possible. The informal support and encouragement of many friends has been indispensable, and I would like particularly to acknowledge the constant encouragement from Lisa Hung, Catherine Hung, Mary Speers, Eddy Chen, and Shirley Keng. My family has been a constant source of support – emotional, and of course financial – during my postgraduate years. My little brother, Yu-Lin Sheu, in particular, had tolerated my nonsense talk whenever I was stuck in my writing. This thesis would certainly not have existed without them. My wholehearted gratitude also goes to a best friend in the United States, Chi-Lin Yeh, whose company of warmth and encouragement had led me through this tough time with a firm and tranquil mind.. ii.

(3) 摘要本研究旨在以準實驗方式探討「字母拼讀法」對 34 位小二學生在英語音韻覺識上的影響。所採用的「字母拼讀法」除了介紹學生認識字母的發音外，並引導學生進行合音練習及切音練習的教學活動。經過一學期五次(將近有 200 分鐘) 的密集訓練後，以量化的方法比較學童前測與後測的表現差異，並進行錯誤分析探討研究議題。研究發現如下：一、整體說來，小二學生在經過「字母拼讀法」的教法後，音韻覺識的表現確實有進步的。此外，研究結果顯示，此教學法對低成就學習者以及低音韻覺識的學生幫助尤為顯著。然而對高成就學習者及具高音韻覺識的學生則無。二、學童主要在兩項音韻覺識的項目上進步顯著：「VC 合音」以及「音素切音」。三、學童對字母與字母聲音關係連結的掌握越高，也越能有音韻覺識能力，如：合音、切音、以及押韻。四、六個音韻覺識能力的項目在難易程度(由簡單到困難依序為)：「VC 合音」< 「CVC 合音」及音節切音 < 押韻 < 「音素切音」< 「CVC 合音」的口說能力。五、學生在六項音韻覺識項目所遭遇的困難包括：字母名稱與字母發音的混淆、相似聲音的錯誤替換、以及多重語音影響等的因素。根據以上研究發現，本研究的「字母拼讀法」相當適合用於增強低音韻覺識能力學生的音韻覺識能力，尤其在「VC 合音」以及「音素切音」的能力之增強。再者，若要訓練學生的音韻覺識能力，建議此訓練建立在學生已對字母與字母聲音關係連結有相當程度上的掌握。另外，針對學生比較會產生混淆的聲音，教師可以在課堂上多做兩兩聲音的對比練習以及強調。. iii.

(4) ABSTRACT. The purpose of the quasi-experimental study is to evaluate the effects of explicit phonics instruction on the phonological awareness (PA) development of thirty four second graders. The major focus of the explicit phonics instruction was to explicitly arouse students’ awareness of letter-sound knowledge and PA skills, such as, blending and segmentation. Over a semester, after the students underwent the treatment for five periods (approximately 200 mins) of intensive trainings, a quantitative approach was implemented to address to the research questions proposed. The results of the present study are as follows: 1. The subjects’ overall phonological awareness skills were improved after explicit phonics instruction. In particularly, the low-achievers and the low-PA students made the most progress in the posttest. However, the instructional effect was not as obvious for the high achievers and the high-PA students. 2. The subjects improved greatly in the VC blending task and the phoneme segmentation task. 3. The subjects’ alphabetic knowledge played facilitative role in enhancing their phonological awareness skills, such as blending, phoneme segmentation, and rhyming. 4. The difficulty orders of the six phonological awareness tasks, from the easiest to the most difficult, were VC-blending < syllable segmentation & CVC-blending < rhyming < phoneme segmentation < CVC oral production. 5. The subjects’ difficulties in their PA performances might result from: letter sound and letter name confusion, wrong substitution of similar letter sounds, and the influence of multiple phonological factors.. iv.

(5) The pedagogical implications of the present study lie in that this explicit approach of phonics instruction is favorable for enhancing students’ phonological awareness ability, especially low-PA students. In addition, this approach is most likely to boost students’ two phonological awareness skills, such as, VC blending and phoneme segmentation. Furthermore, it is suggested that teachers should build up students’ alphabetic knowledge first in promoting their phonological awareness ability. They are also recommended to provide students with more minimal pairs and practices when introducing confusing sounds.. v.

(6) TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgements........................................................................................................ii Chinese Abstract....... ................................................................................................... iii English Abstract........ ....................................................................................................iv Table of Contents...... ....................................................................................................vi List of Figures........... ....................................................................................................ix List of Tables..................................................................................................................x CHAPTER ONE. INTRODUCTION ......................................................................1. 1.1. Motivation.....................................................................................................1. 1.2. Research Questions.......................................................................................3. 1.3. Significance of the Study ..............................................................................4. 1.4. Definition of the Terms Used in the Study....................................................4. 1.5. Organization of the Thesis ............................................................................7. CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW .........................................................8 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. Concepts of Phonics......................................................................................8 2.1.1. The Importance of Phonics Instruction..............................................9. 2.1.2. Phonics Instruction Approaches.......................................................16. Concepts of Phonological Awareness .........................................................20 2.2.1. Phonological Awareness and Development of Early Literacy.........21. 2.2.2. Phonological Awareness Training Activities....................................23. The Reciprocal Relationship Between Phonics and Phonological Awareness...................................................................................................26. 2.4. Summary of Chapter Two ...........................................................................29. CHAPTER THREE 3.1. METHODOLOGY..............................................................31. Research Design..........................................................................................31 vi.

(7) 3.2. Participants..................................................................................................32. 3.3. Instruments..................................................................................................33. 3.4. 3.3.1. Classroom Observation....................................................................33. 3.3.2. Teacher Interview.............................................................................34. 3.3.3. Assessment Tasks.............................................................................34. 3.3.3.1. Alphabetic Knowledge..........................................................36. 3.3.3.2. Rhyming................................................................................36. 3.3.3.3. Blending................................................................................37. 3.3.3.4. Segmentation.........................................................................38. Explicit Phonics Instruction........................................................................40 3.4.1. Individual Letter-Sound Mapping....................................................41. 3.4.2. Blending Skill ..................................................................................42. 3.4.3. Segmentation Skill ...........................................................................44. 3.4.3. Recognition of Sight Words .............................................................47. 3.5. Scoring ........................................................................................................47. 3.6. Data Analysis ..............................................................................................49. 3.7. Summary of Chapter Three.........................................................................52. CHAPTER FOUR RESULTS AND DISCUSSION.............................................53 4.1. Students’ Progress in Phonological Awareness After Explicit Phonics Instruction ..................................................................................................53. 4.2. Aspects of Phonological Awareness Enhanced via Explicit Phonics .........57 Instruction ..................................................................................................57. 4.3. Correlation between Students’ Alphabetic Knowledge and Their Phonological Awareness Skills ..................................................................61. 4.4. The Hierarchical Difficulties of Raising Phonological Awareness.............64. 4.5. The Learning Difficulties of Students in the Phonological Awareness Tasks vii.

(8) ....................................................................................................................68 4.6. Summary of Chapter Four...........................................................................74. CHAPTER FIVE CONCLUSION ........................................................................75 5.1 Summary of the Major Findings ....................................................................75 5.2 Pedagogical Implications ...............................................................................76 5.3 Limitations of the Present Study and Suggestions for Further Research.......78 REFERENCES...........................................................................................................79 Appendix A Lesson Plans .........................................................................................85 Appendix B. Teacher Interview Questions ................................................................90. Appendix C. Pretest ...................................................................................................91. Appendix D Posttest .................................................................................................93. viii.

(9) LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 2-1 Route of Word Recognition.....................................................................10 Figure 2-2 A Continuum of Complexity of Phonological Awareness Activities ......23 Figure 3-1 Procedures of Conducting the Study.......................................................32. ix.

(10) LIST OF TABLES Page Table 2-1 Summaries of Previous Experimental Studies..........................................12 Table 2-2 The Process of Spelling Development......................................................14 Table 2-3. Summaries of the Experimental Studies on Phonics Instruction..............16. Table 2-4 A Summary of the Comparison of Implicit and Explicit Phonics Approaches ..............................................................................................19 Table 3-1 Previous and Present English Learning Experiences................................33 Table 3-2 Classroom Observation Schedule .............................................................34 Table 3-3 Phonological Awareness Skills Evaluated in the Prestest and Posttest.....35 Table 3-4 Example Items of Letter Sound Correspondence (Pretest).......................36 Table 3-5 Example Items of Letter Sound in Isolation (Posttest) .............................36 Table 3-6 Example Items of the Rhyming Task (Posttest)........................................37 Table 3-7 Example Items of V-C Blendings (Pretest)...............................................37 Table 3-8 Example Items of V-C Blendings (Posttest) .............................................37 Table 3-9 Example Items of C-VC Blendings (Pretest)............................................38 Table 3-10 Example Items of C-VC Blendings (Posttest) ........................................38 Table 3-11 Example Items of the C-VC Blending Production Task (Posttest).........38 Table 3-12 Example Items of Syllable Segmentation Task (Posttest) ......................39 Table 3-13 Example Items of Phoneme Segmentation Task (Pretest) ......................39 Table 3-14 Example Items of Phoneme Segmentation Task (Posttest) ....................40 Table 3-15 Instructional Focus in Explicit Phonics Instruction................................40 Table 3-16 Individual Letter-Sound Mapping Activities ..........................................42 Table 3-17 V Varieties in V-C Blending ...................................................................42 Table 3-18 VC Varieties in C-VC Blending..............................................................43 Table 3-19 Blending Practice Activities ...................................................................44 x.

(11) Table 3-20 Segmentation Practice Activities ............................................................46 Table 3-21 Examples Practiced in The Red Cardboard Activity..............................47 Table 3-22 Evaluation of the Difficulty Level of the Three PA Tasks Constructs ....48 Table 3-23 Number of the Subjects in the Higher- and Lower- Achievement Groups ..................................................................................................................49 Table 3-24 Number of the Subjects in the Higher-and Lower- PA Groups ..............50 Table 3-25 Related Measures to the Research Questions of the Present Study........50 Table 4-1 A Comparison of the Subjects’ PA Scores as a Whole .............................54 Table 4-2 A Comparison of the PA scores of the Higher- and Lower- Achieving Groups......................................................................................................55 Table 4-3 A Comparison of the PA Scores of the Higher- and Lower- PA groups ...55 Table 4-4 A Comparison of the Subjects’ Performances on the Three PA Tasks as a Whole.......................................................................................................58 Table 4-5 A Comparison of the Higher- and Lower- Achieving Group’s Performances on the Three Tasks ............................................................59 Table 4-6 A Comparison of the Higher- and Lower-PA groups’ Performances on the Three Tasks ..............................................................................................60 Table 4-7 Errors Made by the Higher PA group in Phoneme Segmentation ............61 Table 4-8 The Correlation between Letter-Sound Correspondence and the PA Tasks ....................................................................................................................62 Table 4-9 A Comparison between VC blending and CVC blending Tasks in the Posttest .....................................................................................................64 Table 4-10 Subjects’ Mean Scores of Each PA Task in the Posttest .........................65 Table 4-11 Subjects’ Score Distribution of the Six PA Tasks ...................................66 Table 4-12 A Comparison of the Difficulty of the PA Tasks ....................................67 Table 4-13 Error Types of Letter Sound and Letter Name Confusion......................69 xi.

(12) Table 4-14 Error Types of Wrong Substitution by Similar Letter Sounds................70 Table 4-15 Error Type of the Influences of Multiple Phonological Factors .............72. xii.

(13) CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION. 1.1 Motivation Learning English is a global trend in the twenty-first century era. As Steven Krashen (2003) described, “…it is difficult in today’s world to be active and successful in international business, politics, scholarship, or science without considerable competence in English” (p. 100). During the life-long English learning journey, how English is first initiated is very important. In Taiwan, students begin their formal English learning journey in third grade in 2005. According to the curriculum guidelines for elementary school English courses established by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan, the primary goal of English instruction is to develop students’ communication skills (cited from Taiwan Elementary and Secondary Educator Community Website). In other words, listening and speaking skills follow this communicative notion more and thus are the major focus in the elementary English curriculum. However, this does not imply that primary teachers should neglect the role of reading, especially in the process of foreign language learning. English is a foreign language in Taiwan. Therefore, students do not have many chances to practice English outside their classrooms. However, the materials used in class are mostly in listening, speaking, reading and written forms of input accompanied by multimedia. To accommodate for the English learning situation in Taiwan, both listening and speaking skills need to be emphasized in the elementary school curriculum. In addition, students’ reading ability, especially oral reading ability needs to be enhanced (Chu, 2008). This way can help students become autonomous English learners for they can find their own reading resources outside the classroom. 1.

(14) One of the approaches to teaching L1 reading in English is through phonics. That is, teaching students the letter-sound relationship. There are several reasons for doing so. First, phonics facilitates students’ decoding words (Beck, 2006), and it prepares students knowledge for word recognition (Beck, 2006). Moreover, knowledge of phonics enables students to read independently (Beck, 2006). As we all know, English is an alphabetic language with its grapheme related to sounds. If students know the strategy to use a relatively small amount of code knowledge to decipher a large number of words, they will have the skill to identify unfamiliar words by themselves later. The importance of phonics instruction at the beginning stage of English learning is obvious. In Taiwan, phonics has been incorporated into the elementary school English curriculum since 2001. In Lin’s (2003) study of teachers’ beliefs and practices in Taiwan, most elementary English teachers reported that phonics instruction could promote good pronunciation and word recognition skills. However, for students to best benefit from phonics instruction, they need phonological awareness knowledge (Chard & Dickson, 1999). Phonological awareness is an “umbrella” term that includes phonemic awareness. It is the understanding that a word is made up of a series of discrete sounds (phonemes). In addition, this awareness includes the ability to identify and manipulate sounds in spoken words. If students have the knowledge that words can be segmented into smaller units like phoneme, and that phonemes can also be blended into words, they are more capable of using letter-sound knowledge to recognize words and read (Chard & Dickson, 1999). Phonological awareness is not equivalent to phonics. The former deals with the awareness to sounds in spoken words whereas the latter involves the relationship between alphabetic letters and sounds. There are two viewpoints of the role of 2.

(15) phonological awareness and phonics. One is that students’ phonological awareness plays a determinant role in the success of phonics instruction (Blachman, 1989). This suggests that students need some degree of phonological awareness before they receive phonics instruction. The second viewpoint is more of a “reciprocal perspective” (Beck, 2006), which suggests that “instructional activities focused on teaching decoding will lead to gains in phonemic awareness.” Following the two lines of thought of the relationship between phonics and phonological awareness, the researcher would like to find out whether or not explicit phonics instruction can foster second-graders’ phonological awareness in Taiwan.. 1.2 Research Questions In Taiwan, phonics is a prevailing approach to helping students develop the knowledge of the English letter-sound relationship i.e., the decoding skill. In addition, phonological and phonemic awareness plays an important role in learning an alphabetic language, like English. The purpose of the study is to find out whether or not students can develop phonological and phonemic awareness after explicit phonics instruction. Therefore the following five research questions will be discussed in the present study. 1. Do students make significant progress in phonological awareness after explicit phonics instruction? 2. What aspects of phonological awareness can/cannot be enhanced via explict phonics instruction? 3. Does students’ alphabetic knowledge correlate with their phonological awareness skills? 4. What is the hierarchical difficulty that students go through in raising their phonological awareness? 3.

(16) 5. What are the learning difficulties that students encounter in the phonological awareness tasks? 1.3 Significance of the Study While there is considerable research on the effects of phonics instruction (Beck, 2006; Dakin, 1999; Foorman, Francis, Novy, & Liberman, 1991; Watson & Johnson, 1998) and phonological and phonemic awareness (Bernstein & Ellis, 2000; Castles & Coltheart, 2004; Chard & Dickson, 1999; Griffith & Olson, 1992) in ESL contexts, very little research examines the effects of explicit phonics instruction on elementary school students’ phonological and phonemic awareness in an EFL context as in Taiwan. This study aims to advance the field of phonics instruction by investigating to what extent explicit phonics instruction can help arouse primary school students’ phonological and phonemic awareness. It is essential for phonics instructors to pay attention to which aspect of phonological and phonemic awareness can or cannot be enhanced via phonics instructions. This study is also important in that it helps teachers realize the hierarchical difficulty that students might go through and can thus design related activities accordingly.. 1.4 Definition of the Terms Used in the Study The following definitions of terms are provided to help readers focus on the intended meaning of the present research. 1) Phonics Phonics is an approach to teach students the relationship between English letters and sounds and how to use those relationships to read words (Beck, 2006). In the present study, it also refers to the knowledge of letter-sound correspondences. 2) Explicit phonics instruction Explicit phonics instruction is one of the instructional strategies adopted to teach 4.

(17) phonics (Beck, 2006). It is explicit in that the letter and sound relationships are directly taught. Students are told, for example, that the letter t represents the [t] sound. In addition, in the present study, the explicitness also refers to the direct teaching of blending and segmentation (Beck, 2006) (see Definitions 7 and 8 below). 3) Alphabetic knowledge Alphabetic knowledge is the same as letter-sound knowledge; it is the recognition that in an alphabetic language, like English, a letter is associated with a unit of sound, that is, phoneme (Beck, 2006). For example, the letter m in the word map is associated with the phoneme /m/. 4) Decode/decoding To decode or decoding in the present study is defined by the broad term, which refers to the process readers use to translate written language into inner speech as in the process of word recognition or sound out written language into oral speech (Eldredge, 1995). 5) Phonological awareness Phonological awareness is an umbrella term for the knowledge that spoken words can be divided into smaller units and can be manipulated. It includes a continuum of multilevel skills of rhyming, sentence segmentation, syllable segmentation & blending, onset-rime blending & segmentation, and blending & segmenting individual phonemes, ranging from the least complex to the most complex (Chard & Dickson, 1999). 6) Phonemic awareness Phonemic awareness is the sub-skill under the encompassing term of phonological awareness. It is the awareness of the discrete sounds (phonemes) that make up spoken words (Chard & Dickson, 1999). For example, the awareness that both cat and map are composed of three distinct phonemes. 5.

(18) 7) Blending Blending is one of the phonological skills that have received the most attention in the causal role of learning to read and spell. According to Davidson & Jenkins (1994), a typical phonemic blending task requires students to combine a sequence of isolated phonemes to produce a word. For example, students are asked in class to say each sound in the word, [c] [æ] [t] in cat, and then blend the three sounds into [kæt]. 8) Segmentation Conversely, segmentation, another phonological skill that is correlated to success in learning to reading and spelling, involves the ability to identify the discrete phonemes in a spoken word (Davidson & Jenkins, 1994). For example, in a typical phonemic segmentation task, students are led to say the individual sounds [m] [æ] [p] after they hear the word map. In addition, phoneme identity training is also one kind of. segmentation. training. (Byrne. &. Fielding-Barnsley,. 1989;. Byrne. &. Fielding-Barnsley, 1993). The phoneme identity training leads students to the awareness of similar sounds in the beginning or in the final position of words. For example, students are guided to notice the same sound of [m] in the initial position of milk, mouth, and Martin; or in the final position of mum and sum. 9) Rhyming Rhyming in words is a phonological awareness skill that children are easily sensitive to in early literacy acquisition. For that reason, Adams et al. (1998) suggested that “rhyme play is an excellent entry to phonological awareness (p.29)”. As children’s attention is directed to the similarities and differences in the rhymes of words, they are more aware that in language there is not only meaning and message but also physical form (Adams et al., 1998).. 6.

(19) 1.5 Organization of the Thesis This thesis is organized as follows: Chapter Two reviews related propositions and empirical research on phonics and phonological awareness. Previous studies related to the concepts of phonics and phonological awareness in ESL and EFL settings will be reported, including empirical studies of the relationship between phonics and phonological awareness. Chapter Three describes the experimental design including the participants, instructional and assessment procedures, scoring and data analysis. Chapter Four presents and discusses results of the proposed five research questions. Chapter Five provides pedagogical implications, acknowledges the limitations and offers suggestions for future study.. 7.

(20) CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW. In this chapter, issues and studies related to phonics and phonological awareness will be reviewed. The issues discussed are: concepts about phonics, including the importance of phonics instruction and phonics instruction approaches, concepts of phonological awareness in terms of its effects to early literacy, the reciprocal relationship between phonological awareness and phonics instruction, and phonological training activities. Finally, a summary of this chapter is provided.. 2.1 Concepts of Phonics Phonics is a prevailing approach in early reading instruction. According to Heilman (1998), “the purpose of phonics instruction is to provide beginning readers with the ability to associate printed letters with their corresponding speech sounds.” As Stahl (1992) also noted: Phonics refers to various approaches designed to teach children about the orthographic code of the language and the relationships of spelling patterns to sound patterns (p. 618). By helping students recognize the relationship between English alphabetic letters and sounds, students are supposed to equip themselves with the important knowledge of word recognition. In other words, phonics instruction emphasizes on the bottom-up decoding of words, which is the opposite of the top-down whole language approach when teaching the reading skill (Adams & Bruck,1995; Dakin, 1999; Eldredge, 1995). In the following sections, the importance of phonics instruction and contemporary approaches to teaching phonics will be discussed.. 8.

(21) 2.1.1. The Importance of Phonics Instruction. The importance of phonics instruction lies in that it prepares students with word recognition, reading, and spelling skills. Each is discussed below.. Word recognition skills For students to recognize words effectively, they need a general understanding of the nature of the English orthography. English is an alphabetical language, which indicates that the spellings of words are closely related to the corresponding sounds of the words. Based on this characteristic of the English orthography, Ehri (1992) explains how phonics knowledge may affect the word recognition process by a “visual-phonological-meaning” route: The critical connections that enable readers to find specific words in lexical memory by means of this visual-phonological route are connections linking spellings to pronunciations rather than to meanings. However, connections between spellings and meanings are easily formed in the process of establishing visual-phonological routes….The visual-phonological connections that readers have formed for a word make that spelling a visual symbol for its pronunciation. This means in effect that readers “see” the pronunciation when they look at the spelling, and this event creates direct links between the spelling and its meaning. Thus, readers access not only pronunciations but also meanings directly when they learn to read words by means of visual-phonological route. (p. 115-116) The process of word recognition was further depicted by Stuart (1995) in Figure 2-1 below.. 9.

(22) Step1 see printed word. Example “clock”. parse letter string. Step. Step3. translate print segments to sound. c-l-o-ck →. blend sounds. c-l-o-ck ↓↓↓ ↓ [k][l][ɑ][k] → klɑk. Figure 2-1 Route of Word Recognition. match with spoken word. understand word meaning. clock. (taken from Stuart, 1995). According to Stuart, when readers first see a word in print, they will go through three important steps: (1) parsing letter string into print segments, (2) mapping the print segments onto the corresponding sounds, and (3) blending the sounds into the pronunciation of the word. After they decode the pronunciation of the word, they can match the sound with the spoken lexicon in their minds and thus attain the ultimate goal of understanding the word meaning. This word recognition procedure further illustrates that students’ knowledge of the letter-sound correspondence which is enhanced by phonics instruction can help them figure out the meaning of the printed word through the mapping of letters and sounds. It is this process that leads letters to sounds, and finally to meaning. While others may argue that the English orthography is notorious for its inconsistencies between letters and sounds, for there are only 26 alphabet letters in English, but with about 44 to 52 phonemes to match to (Adams, Foorman, Lundberg, & Beeler, 1998). Hu and Kai (2000) contended, “It is exactly the presence of. 10.

(23) irregularities in the English orthography that makes instruction in phonics crucial to the success of reading performance.” For example, the English orthography is inconsistent in the following four aspects: (1) one sound could be represented by different combination of letters, such as [i] by these, meal, cheese, field, seize, people; (2) one letter could produce different sounds, such as do, woman, women, done, dot, bone; (3) a diagraph could produce only a single sound, such as chorus, phone, that, kick; (4) a letter could be silent, such as write, knock, scissor, lamb, salmon (Hu & Kai, 2000). Phonics instruction provides students with adequate alphabetic rules to choose among a set of possible candidate sounds, the correct pronunciation of the word (Share, & Stanovich, 1995). With the corresponding letter-sound knowledge in mind, students are ready to venture in the authentic word hunt. As they apply their alphabetic rules to test on the words that are of irregular form, although they may not be completely correct in the first place, they have accessed to match the decoded phonological information of the words to their known-word repertoire (Hu & Kai, 2000). The more student venture in decoding unfamiliar words, the more trial and error experiences facilitate them to establish the repertoire of word-specific, irregular orthographic representation (Hu & Kai, 2000).. Reading skills Reading is not a single process. Rather, it is a complex process composed of concurrent subprocesses. According to Beck (2006), there are three interrelated steps to the route of successful reading: (1) recognizing words, (2) linking strings of words into phrases, clauses and sentences, and (3) making senses of the sentences and the related reading context (p.7). As mentioned in the previous section, students’ letter-sound knowledge plays an important role in word identification and recognition 11.

(24) strategies. That is why Adams and Bruck (1995) claim that: scientific research converges on the point that the association of spellings with sounds is a fundamental step in the early stages of literacy instruction… There are literally hundreds of articles to support [this] conclusion. …children’s knowledge of the correspondences between spellings and sounds is found to predict the speed and accuracy with which they can read single words, while the speed and accuracy with which they can read single words is found to predict their ability to comprehend text. (p.15) Proficient readers are more efficient during the word recognition process, which saves them time toward comprehending the text, the primary goal of reading. Experimental studies (Foorman & Liberman, 1989; McCandliss, Beck, Sandak, & Perfetti, 2003; Yen, 2004) also provide evidence of the positive role phonics plays in reading process as shown in Table 2-1. Table 2-1 Summaries of Previous Experimental Studies Researchers. Year. Context Participants. Foorman & Liberman. 1989 ESL. 80 first graders. McCandliss et al.. 2003 ESL. 38 elementary focusing on the The result showed school decoding skills significant progress students in decoding, phonemic awareness, and reading comprehension.. Yen. 2004 EFL. 41third-grade students. 12. Procedures. Results. phonological processing v.s visual processing. Good readers tended to use more phonological processing skills.. focusing on direct and systematic phonics instruction and authentic readings. Positive effects were found on the ability to decode letter sounds, recognize words, and comprehend sentences and stories..

(25) Foorman and Liberman (1989) compared first-grade good readers and poor readers on their tendency to process words either visually or phonologically. They found that good readers tended to read aloud words and spell words based on phonological rules while poor readers did not demonstrate this skill as effectively. McCandliss et al. (2003) examined the effects of training in decoding to elementary school students with poor reading ability and they found that those who underwent the intervention training on decoding significantly improved in decoding, phonemic awareness, and reading comprehension. In addition, in an EFL environment, Yen (2004) examined the effects of explicit phonics instruction and authentic readings on 41 third-grade students with two stages. At the first stage, the students received 20 hours of explicit phonics instruction and reading comprehension; that is, they were trained directly and systematically to decode English letters, words, and sentences, as well as to understand English words, and sentences. At the second stage, the students were tested for the empirical evidence of the effect of explicit phonics instruction and authentic readings on EFL elementary students. The results indicated that intensive and explicit phonics instruction yielded positive effects on EFL young learners’ ability to decode letter sounds and words, recognize words, and comprehend texts.. Spelling skills Spelling is a constructive developmental process. As depicted in Table 2-2, Gentry & Gillet (1993) found out that the development of spelling process might consist of five stages.. 13.

(26) Table 2-2. The Process of Spelling Development (taken from Gentry & Gillet, 1993). Stage 1: The Precommunicative Stage. Children produced letter-like forms to represent their message. However, there was no sound connection to the letters they write.. Stage 2: The Semiphonetic Stage. Children developed letter-sound awareness. They used a single letter name to represent an entire word. For example, R for the word are or U for you.. Stage 3: The Phonetic Stage. Children developed systematic knowledge of the letter-sound relationship. They began to know common letter patterns.. Stage 4: The Transitional Stage. Children relied on the visual memory to spell words and begin to recognize alternative spellings of the same sounds.. Stage 5: The mature Stage. Children internalized visual patterns and demonstrate accuracy in silent consonant and irregular spellings.. During the five-stage spelling process, students progress from the initial scribble writing stage in which they produce letter-like forms with no sound connection to the middle stages in which students gradually develop knowledge of the systematic mapping between letters and sounds to the final stage in which students gain subtle and sophisticated knowledge of the English spelling system. Students’ spelling skill could be further developed and strengthened through phonics instruction. In addition, spelling demands two major skills, namely, memory and prediction (http://www.schools.utah.gov/curr/lang_art/elem/core/CoreDocs/scope/PhonicsSpellin g4.pdf). Students’ memory loads of the printed words are reduced during the spelling process as phonics instruction helps advance their letter-sound predicting rate. There are three ways to strengthen students’ spelling skill via the phonics approach (Adams & Bruck, 1995). First, students can be directed to be aware of the context clues that abound in the letter-sound rules. For example, the long vowel [e] may be spelled with y at the end of words such as prey, grey, & stay but y at the beginning does not yield 14.

(27) long [e] as in yesterday, yes, & yellow. In addition, phonics instruction which directs students’ attention to structured spelling activities helps them analyze and explore difficult consonant blends, for example, rain, train, strain. Moreover, students can be guided to the spelling patterns of word families, ranging from the basics, such as pill, will, mill, etc & came, name, same, etc to more advanced and sophisticated patterns such as -tle, -ture, -tion, etc. Students who have access to the letter-sound rules are able to apply the necessary strategies in their spelling process. Data from the experimental studies (Bruck, Treiman, Caravolas, Genesee, & Cassar, 1998; Foorman, Francis, Novy, & Liberman, 1991; Griffith, & Klesius, 1990) also indicate that phonics instruction facilitates the acquisition of spelling skills. Griffith and Klesius (1990) examined the effect of the reading instructional approach on first graders’ acquisition of spelling and decoding skills. Two first-grade classes in a rural Florida school district were included in this study. The results indicated that while students in the whole language classroom became more fluent writers; those in the explicit phonics classroom became more accurate spellers. Furthermore, Foorman et al. (1991) compared the spelling progress of two groups of 40 first-graders. One group received instruction on letter-sound correspondences, another group was instructed on words in meaningful context. The findings showed that those who experienced phonics instruction were more accurate in spelling out both regular words and irregular words. Moreover, the errors they produced are more related to the letter-sound relationship. In addition, a study conducted by Bruck et al. (1998) yielded similar results. Bruck et al. (1998) compared the spelling skills of 22 third graders who received phonics instruction and 54 third graders who received the whole language approach. Overall, the phonics group produced more accurate spelling and their spellings of nonwords include more conventional, and phonologically accurate patterns. Table 2-3 provides the summaries of the studies 15.

(28) mentioned above.. Table 2-3 Summaries of the Experimental Studies on Phonics Instruction Researchers. Year. Griffith & Klesius. 1990 ESL. Foorman et al.. Bruck et al.. 2.1.2. Context Participants. Procedures. Results. 2 first-grade classes. Phonics v.s Whole language. The phonics group became more accurate spellers in their compositions. 1991 ESL. 80 first graders. Phonics v.s Word-based. The phonics group improved at a faster rate in correct spellings.. 1998 ESL. 76 third graders. Phonics v.s Whole language. The phonics group produced more accurate word spellings.. Phonics Instruction Approaches Given that phonics instruction is highly correlated with the success of early. literacy acquisition (Adams & Bruck,1995; Eldredge, 1995), this section focuses on which current approach to phonics teaching is most effective. A large number of phonics teaching methods have been put into practice to promote students’ reading and spelling skills in both English as a first language and as a foreign language learning environments. Despite the varieties of the approaches, these approaches are generally put into two broad categories: implicit and explicit approach. Implicit phonics approach Implicit phonics instruction is a whole-to-part, analytic approach (Dakin, 1999, Eldredge, 1995), which emphasizes that students rely more on the contextual clues to figure out the letter-sound corresponding rules. Proponents of this approach perceive 16.

(29) “meaning” as the major focus of reading instruction and believe that “meaning is deemphasized” when students put too much focus on decoding (Eldredge, 1995). In implicit phonics teaching classrooms, teachers usually read story books to students and students understand words through pictures or context. After students have recognized a number of commonly used words, those words are “analyzed” with the shared similar sounds among those words identified along with the letters that represent them. While implicit phonics approaches do not ignore the letter-sound relationship, they do not emphasize segmenting or blending letter sounds. This is the way it works. Students learn words as a whole first, such as cat, cake, camp, and then the teacher guides them to look for the similarities of the initial sound [k] and make association with the first letter c. In short, phonics is taught by analyzing known words to learn about their discrete parts. However, there are two pitfalls for the implementation of implicit phonics instruction. Beck and Juel (1995) argued that students might fail in inducing distinctive sounds among the words with the lack of segmentation skills. In addition, for the instruction to be effective, it could take up to three years of training process (Watson & Johnson, 1998). The Whole Language Approach, an application of the implicit phonics instruction, is thus of heated debate.. Explicit phonics approach On the contrary, explicit phonics instruction is a part-to-whole, synthetic approach (Dakin, 1999). It is based on the premise that children should master decoding first when learning to read (Eldredge, 1995). A Scholastic Teachers’ Website (www.teacher.scholastic.com/reading/bestpractices/phonics/explicit. systematic.pdf). pointed out that explicit phonics instruction focuses on the direct and systematic 17.

(30) teaching of the corresponding letter-sound knowledge and training of the phonological awareness skills, such as blending and segmentation. In short, the teacher who applies explicit phonics teaching in the classrooms first introduces students the matching sounds of the letters, then instructs students to blend the sounds together to read or instruct them to listen for the discrete sounds in a word. This is what happens in an explicit phonics teaching classroom. The teacher starts with introducing the letter c on the blackboard and has students chant out the sounds of letter c as [k], letter a as [æ], letter t as [t]. Next, the teacher demonstrates a picture word card of a cat. Then the teacher demonstrates the blending skill vividly to students by making the hand folding gesture (Hu & Kai, 2000) as she points to the letters c a t from left to right, synthesizing the sounds [kæt]. In addition, the teacher trains students with segmentation skills; for example, students listen for discrete sounds in the word cat, with one letter covered, by figuring out which is the correct letter representing that sound. However, Beck and Juel (1995) pointed out one potential problem with explicit phonics instruction. They noted that some consonantal sounds could not be produced in isolation without adding a schwa, or [uh], such as, the isolated sound of the letter b in but is distorted to [buh]. Yet Beck and Juel (1995) concluded that teaching students to isolate sounds still offer an advantage when it was done in moderation and combined with explicit blending instruction. Furthermore, this approach could be taught in a few months (Watson & Johnson, 1998). The comparison between implicit and explicit phonics approaches is summarized in Table 2-4:. 18.

(31) Table 2-4 A Summary of the Comparison of Implicit and Explicit Phonics Approaches Implicit (Analytic) Phonics Approach. Explicit (Synthetic) Phonics Approach. Procedure. Whole word to parts. Individual letter-sound to whole word. Application. Letter-sound rules are implicitly mentioned: The Whole Language Approach follows this principle.. Letter-sound rules and phonological awareness training such as blending and segmentation skills are explicitly instructed.. Difficulty. Students may lack the ability to induce discrete sounds within a word. Phonetic value of an isolated sound is likely to be distorted.. Instruction Time. Up to 3 years. In a few months. Effects. Research results tend to support explicit phonics instructions.. In the recent decade, there have been debates of the effects of explicit and implicit phonics instruction among researchers (Adams, & Bruck, 1995; Beck, 2006; Watson & Johnson, 1998), and the evidence mostly endorsed the effects of explicit phonics instruction on students’ literacy development. In their article Resolving the “Great Debate,” Adams & Bruck’s (1995) argued for the explicit phonics approach over the whole language approach, proposed that “explicit and direct attention to phonics supports reading and spelling growth better than opportunistic attention to phonics while reading” (p. 17). In addition, Beck (2006) in her book Making Sense of Phonics: the Hows and Whys provided three anecdotes concerning the reading skill of a previously taught first-grade class, army sergeants, and her own children. She found that for the three groups of learners to become successful readers, they needed to be explicitly and systematically instructed on the letter-sound relationship, segmentation and blending skills at the early stage of learning to read. Watson & Johnson (1998) conducted a study examining the impact of analytic 19.

(32) and synthetic phonics teaching on reading, spelling, and phonemic awareness. Their study lasted for ten weeks with two 15-minute sessions per week. Three groups of students received different training procedures. The first group, i.e. the control group, was only taught to look-and-say with printed words and pictures and received no extra phonics training. The second group was taught by the implicit analytic phonics approach, directing students’ attention only to the letters in the initial position of words. The third group received the explicit synthetic approach which focused on letters in initial, middle, and final positions of words; they were also instructed directly to sound out and build up words by blending the magnetic letters. The results showed that synthetic phonics teaching led to more effective reading, spelling and phonemic awareness than analytic phonics teaching. Furthermore, in explicit instruction students got familiar with the letter sound relationship and could blend letter sounds to pronounce unfamiliar words.. 2.2 Concepts of Phonological Awareness Phonological awareness is the understanding or insight that oral language can be divided into smaller language units and a series of discrete sounds. This awareness includes the ability to perceive and manipulate sounds in spoken words. It short, it is a multilevel skill of breaking down spoken sounds into smaller phonemes which includes the following aspects (Chard & Dickson, 1999; Eldredge, 1995): words within sentences, rhyming units within words (e.g. the words sun, run and fun rhyme), syllables within words (e.g. in the word beautiful, “beau”, “ti”, “ful” are the three syllables), onset and rime within words (e.g. in the word fish, [f] is the onset, [ɪʃ] ) is the rime), and individual phonemes within words (e.g. in the word paper, [p], [e], [p], [ɚ] are the discrete phonemes). Being phonologically aware means having a general understanding and control of all of these levels (Chard & Dickson, 1999). 20.

(33) 2.2.1. Phonological Awareness and Development of Early Literacy Over the past decades, substantial research (Bernstein & Ellis, 2000; Byrne &. Fielding-Barnsley, 1993; Castles & Coltheart; Cunningham, 1990; Davidson & Jenkins, 1994; Kozminsky & Kozminsky, 1995; Muter, Hulme, Snowling, & Taylor, 1997; Su, 2001; Treiman & Baron, 1983) provides evidence for a strong link between phonological awareness and early literacy development. Both phonological awareness and alphabetic knowledge work together to support the earliest stages of reading and spelling acquisition. As phonics instruction provides students with adequate alphabetic knowledge that is important to beginning literacy development, training on phonological and phonemic awareness equip students with additional knowledge to decode and spell. Students’ success in early reading and spelling abilities depends on whether or not they achieve a certain level of phonological awareness. Among the various skills of phonological awareness, segmentation, and blending are most closely associated with reading and spelling skills (Treiman & Baron, 1983). In a longitudinal study, Kozminsky & Kozminsky (1995) examined the effects of early phonological awareness training on reading success. Seventy children from two separate classes participated in the study. They received eight-month phonological training focusing on blending and segmentation. Phonological awareness and reading comprehension were measured at the end of kindergarten, first grade, and third grade. The result of this study confirmed the predictive and causal relationship between phonological awareness and success in reading comprehension. In addition, another two-year-long longitudinal study conducted by Muter et al. (1997) investigated the effects of phonological awareness skills on early reading and spelling progress. Thirty-eight four-year-old children who were all nonreaders were measured on a battery of phonological awareness tests which focused on their 21.

(34) rhyming and blending skills. The results indicated that the phonemic segmentation skills strongly correlated with attainment in reading and spelling while the rhyming skills did not in the first year but showed predictive effect on spelling by the end of the second year. Furthermore, the students were more likely to perform significantly better on the reading achievement test if they were explicitly raised to the “metalevel” of the value and goal of the phonemic awareness skills. This was found in an experimental study conducted by Cunningham (1990), which examined the effect of explicit phonemic awareness instruction that directed students to reflect upon the purposes and application of blending and segmentation when they read. The following illustrated what happened in the classroom: …Children are explicitly told that when they came up with a word they did not know, a good strategy would be to “cut the word up” into its smallest pieces, think about what the word sounds like, and then think if they know any words that resemble that combination of sounds. Or the children were told to think about the story they were reading and decide if [b] [a] [t] fits into their story of a baseball player. (p. 435). Likewise, EFL adult students’ phonological awareness was also predictive of their spelling proficiency in English. Su (2001) investigated the correlation between the phonological awareness and spelling proficiency of two groups of students (54 from a four-year college; 48 from a five-year college). They were measured upon a spelling test and a phoneme deletion task. The outcomes supported the role of phonological awareness in spelling proficiency which was in conformance to the studies conducted on English-speaking students.. 22.

(35) 2.2.2. Phonological Awareness Training Activities In practice, students demonstrate phonological awareness skills through different. difficulty levels of phonological awareness tasks. As shown in Figure 2-2, Chard & Dickson (1999) illustrated five tasks presented in a continuum of complexity.. Figure 2-2. A Continuum of Complexity of Phonological Awareness Activities (adapted from Chard & Dickson, 1999). At the less complex end of the continuum, rhyming songs and sentence segmentation activities demonstrate students’ awareness that verbal speech can be broken down into individual words. At the center of the continuum are activities related to segmenting words into syllables and blending syllables into words as well as segmenting words into onsets and rimes and blending onsets and rimes into words. At the end of the continuum is the most sophisticated level of phonological awareness activities that require ability to manipulate phonemes either by segmenting, blending, or changing individual phonemes within words to create new words. Students often attend primary school unaware that words consist of sounds. According to Adams et al. (1998), without explicit instruction on the phonological 23.

(36) awareness skills, nearly 25% of middle-class first graders and substantially more students from the less-literacy class are eluded by the concept. For the purpose of guiding students to discover the separability of sounds and the existence of phonemes, explicit and direct phonological awareness activities are designed in the reading classrooms. Most phonological awareness activities are designed in a playful manner and provide students with engaging ways to discriminate sounds in oral language. Following introduces phonological awareness activities which focus on rhyming awareness, syllable awareness, segmentation and blending.. Rhyming activities Sensitivity to rhyming is relatively easy to most children and rhyming activities are most appealing to kindergarten-age children (Cunningham, 2005). In this sense, Adams et al. (1998) suggest that rhyme play activities should be an excellent entry to phonological awareness. Listening to rhyming stories, nursery rhymes, reciting rhyming songs and reading poems are all activities to direct children’s attention to the similarities and differences in the sounds of words. As children participated in rhyme play activities, they gradually develop insight that in language, there is not only meaning but also linguistic forms.. Syllable awareness activities Unlike words, syllables are meaningless and are relatively difficult for children to be aware of. However, according to Adams et al. (1998), we can still feel and hear “the successive syllables of spoken language which correspond to the sound pulses as well as the opening and closing cycles of the jaw (p. 49).” To introduce students to the syllable concept, students are led to clap and count the syllables in their own names or 24.

(37) words that they are familiar with. Alternatively, an activity can be designed in which students are told a story about a king who spoke strangely and that nobody could understand what he wanted. The king spoke in a syllable-by-syllable fashion, for example, ba-na-na, and needed the children to translate for him. Children are expected to say the word out in a regular way or select a picture that represents the object. Students’ awareness of syllables in words may equip them toward the awareness of discrete phonemes in words (Hu & Kai, 2000).. Segmentation activities Segmentation, the ability to separate out the sounds in a word, is one crucial phonological awareness skill (Cunningham, 2005). Segmentation is not an easy skill for many children. To begin with, students are led to segment the initial sound (the onset) from the rest of the word (the rime); and gradually they are guided to segment words into discrete sound. In other words, it is easier for students to break down bat into b-at before they perceive the three distinctive sounds b-a-t. Hu & Kai (2000) suggested an activity for students to imagine that they are on a slow moving pace planet. Pictures with the words students are familiar with are hung in the classroom. Students are led to move around slowly as an astronaut and are guided to say the things they see on the planet in a very slow discrete way, for example, f------i--------sh.. Blending activities Blending, the ability to put sounds together to form a word, is also a critical phonological awareness skill (Cunningham, 2005). Blending is also very challenging to most students. To begin with the oral blending exercises, students are first led to blend larger word parts, such as syllables, next progress to blending onsets and rimes 25.

(38) and finally blending discrete sounds into words. In a similar fashion as the segmentation skill, most students can blend S-am to produce the name Sam before they can blend S-a-m. A guessing game activity can be designed during which the teacher selects an object from a bag and say “I have a f-----i------sh” (Hu & Kai, 2000). Students may demonstrate their understanding of the blending skill by listening to the sound and guessing what the thing is among the pictures or objects provided. In addition, at early stages of oral blending exercises, words that begin with continuous consonants such as s, m, l, f, r, and z are better choices to be presented first (the Scholastic Teachers’ Website). This is because theses continuous sounds can be sustained in a natural manner and are less likely to be distorted when blended with subsequent vowel sounds. This way, it is easier for students to hear the distinct phonemic sounds and they can therefore model the process of oral blending more efficiently. For example, the word sat can be exaggerated and stretched out like this: sssssssssaaaat. Hand movements can also be provided to help students visually note when the speaker goes from one sound to the next. Many students are likely to benefit from these visual cues.. 2.3 The Reciprocal Relationship Between Phonics and Phonological Awareness Phonological awareness is not a synonymous term for phonics, which involves the relationship between sounds and letters (in alphabetic orthographies). Instead, phonological awareness plays an important role in facilitating the acquisition of the knowledge of letter-sound relationship in phonics instruction (Eldredge, 1995; Hu & Kai, 2000). In short, phonological awareness training provides the foundation on which phonics instruction is built. Therefore, students need solid phonological awareness training in order to benefit from phonics instruction. For example, phonics instruction that begins by asking a child what sound the words sit, sand, and sock 26.

(39) have in common will not make sense to a child who has difficulty discriminating sounds in words, who cannot segment sounds within words, or who does not understand what is meant by the term “sound.” He or she must be able to auditorily segment [s] from the words sit, sand, and sock before the sound makes sense to him or her that the letter s stands for this sound in these words. It would be more difficult for him or her to associate letters with sounds if he or she cannot segment and hear the phoneme in speech. Dixon, Stuart, and Masterson (2002) examined the development of the letter-sound corresponding knowledge of 46 five-year-old children with various phoneme segmentation tasks. The results showed that children who demonstrated ability in phoneme segmentation tasks internalized orthographic representation and acquired new words more efficiently. However, the relationship between phonological awareness and alphabetic knowledge is not unidirectional but reciprocal in nature (Beck, 2006; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1989; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley; 1990; Johnston, Anderson, & Holligan, 1996; Yopp, 1992). In short, there is a mutual supportive relationship between learning to read an alphabetic script and phonological awareness. As Yopp (1992) stated below: …in order to benefit from formal reading instruction, youngsters must have a certain level of phonemic awareness. Reading instruction, in turn, heightens their awareness of language. Thus, phonemic awareness is both a prerequisite for and a consequence of learning to read (p.697).. The reciprocal relationship between knowledge of alphabet and explicit awareness of phonemes is further captured by Johnston et al. (1996). They postulated that non-readers might also develop insights into the phonological structure of spoken words by becoming aware of the connection between the sounds of letters in 27.

(40) environmental prints and sounds of the spoken words. This is to say, students develop phonological awareness as they match words in their oral repertoire with written words in print that prevail in the environment (signs, labels on food, letters, notes, books, magazines, and even print on TV). The more students interact with the written language, the more they will discover important phonological awareness concepts that contribute to their emerging literacy. Studies have provided positive effects of explicit phonics instruction on students’ phonological awareness abilities in both first language contexts and in Taiwan. Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley (1989,1990) in their empirical studies of prereaders, indicated that only those children who had been instructed explicitly on the letter-sound relationship along with segmentation ability were more readily to decode and recognize words. For example, those who were taught that the letters m and s stood for the initial sounds of mat and sat, and who could segment those sounds as well as read the words, were subsequently able to decide that mow was represented by the written word mow rather than sow. In addition, Joseph’s (2000) experimental studies on the comparison of two contemporary phonic approaches, word box instruction and word sort instruction, revealed that word boxes were supportive of students’ ability to segment phonemes as well as making left-to right letter-sound correspondences and that word sorts were facilitative of their ability to compare and contrast spelling patterns among words. The explicit training effects on phonological awareness skills were also evident in an intervention program conducted by McCandliss et al. (2003). Their intervention program was intended to help young learners with poor decoding skills by directing students’ attention to the different letter-sounds on the same positions in words. It was found that the students had gained more scores in decoding, phonemic awareness, and passage comprehension after the treatment. Studies in Taiwan revealed similar results. Huang (2002) investigated on 28.

(41) whether first-year junior high school students could be trained to foster their phonological awareness through phonics instruction. In her study, sixty-seven students were arranged into a control group, receiving K.K. phonetic symbols instruction and the experimental group, receiving letter-sound correspondences, and various phonological awareness skills such as blending, rhyming and syllable counting. The results showed that the experimental group performed better on the rhyming, segmentation, and pseudo-word reading tasks. Tsai (2004) investigated elementary school students’ development of phonological processing under the training of school EFL curriculum. Sixty students from the fourth and sixth grade took eight phonological processing tasks. The result showed that the school English training program was facilitative of the English phonological processing development, and suggested that the developmental sequence of the phonological awareness students developed their phonological awareness ability in the sequence of syllable awareness, rhyming, phoneme awareness, and phonological recoding.. 2.4 Summary of Chapter Two Phonics is a prevailing approach in early reading instruction. By helping students recognize the relationship between English alphabet letters and sounds, students are equipped with the important knowledge for word recognition, reading and spelling. Furthermore, the effectiveness of phonics knowledge on word recognition, reading, and spelling has been supported by some empirical studies (Bruck, Treiman, Caravolas, Genesee, & Cassar, 1998; Foorman, & Liberman, 1989; Foorman, Francis, Novy, & Liberman, 1991; Griffith, & Klesius, 1990; McCandliss, Beck, Sandak, & Perfetti, 2003; Yen, 2004). Implicit and explicit phonics instruction approaches are the two contemporary approaches to reading instruction. While the former instructs reading starting at the whole word level and then move to the smaller linguistic units; 29.

(42) the latter explicitly and systematically directs students’ attention to the individual letter-sound relationship before moving on to whole words. The results of substantial empirical research showed preference for the explicit phonics approach for its effectiveness in developing successful readers and spellers (Adams, & Bruck, 1995; Beck, 2006; Watson, & Johnson, 1998). Phonological awareness refers to the ability to perceive and manipulate sounds in spoken words. It consists of multilevel skills to break down a string of sounds, including: words within sentences, rhyming units with words, syllables within words, onset and rime within words, and finally individual phonemes within words. Substantial empirical studies showed strong links on phonological awareness performance in early literacy development. Segmentation and blending are the two critical phonological awareness skills that have strong correlation with reading and spelling. Possible phonological awareness activities which focus on rhyming awareness, syllable awareness, segmentation and blending have been introduced by Hu and Kai (2000). Furthermore, phonological awareness and phonics knowledge are mutually supportive. While phonological awareness provides students with the foundation on which phonics instruction is built, without the letter-sound mapping knowledge, students still lack the ability to decode and recognize words. The effects of explicit phonics instruction on phonological awareness are evident in both first language contexts and in Taiwan. Based upon the preceding review on the concepts and issues of phonics instruction and phonological awareness, an experimental design is introduced in the next chapter to address the five research questions of the present study.. 30.

(43) CHAPTER THREE METHODOLOGY This chapter presents a detailed description of the methodology employed in carrying out this study. First, a summary of the research design is given. Second, the participants of the study are described. Third, the instruments used in the data collection process are discussed in detail. Fourth, the explicit phonics instruction procedure section describes the instructional focus and activities. Fifth, the scoring method and data analysis is presented. The final section summarizes the main points of this chapter.. 3.1 Research Design This study was conducted in an elementary school in the northern part of Taiwan in the spring semester of 2007 (from March to June). The research methodology employed was a quasi-experimental1 study with the main purpose to evaluate the effects of explicit phonics instruction on the phonological awareness development of preliterate second graders. The researcher observed a second grade English class designed as an experimental group which was instructed by an English teacher of the school. In March, students were first investigated on their previous English learning experiences and were also evaluated on a pretest. After these students had received intensive explicit phonics instruction on blending and segmentation for five periods of classes (approximately 200 mins), with a two-to-three-week interval between each period, they were tested again in a posttest to see their progress in phonological 1. Originally, this study was conducted as an example of action research in an elementary school with one experimental group and one control group. However, due to some educational ethical concerns, the two groups only differed slightly in teaching instructions and activities, which would be difficult for the present study to make a sharp contrast on the effects of explicit phonics instruction on the phonological awareness development of preliterate second graders. For this reason, the research methodology employed was changed to a quasi-experimental study including only the experimental group students. 31.

(44) awareness. Rainbow English 2 was the textbook selected for the participants. The procedures of conducting this study are illustrated in Figure 3-1:. Investigation on students’ background. Pretest. Classroom observation + Teacher interview. Posttest. Figure 3-1. Procedures of Conducting the Study. 3.2 Participants In the present study, 34 second graders, 16 boys and 18 girls, of one class and an English teacher in an elementary school in the northern part of Taiwan participated in this study. The average age of these students was 9 years old. Table 3-1 presents the above information. As shown in Table 3-1, the previous English learning experiences of the participants are quite similar. The majority of the students did not have the experiences of living in English speaking countries, only two students revealed that they have, but were both less than a year (one in Canada for half a year; the other in New Zealand for one month). Nearly 70 % of the students had the experiences of learning English before they entered elementary school. Although most students had 32.

(45) received English instruction previously, 68 % of students also revealed that they rarely had any opportunity to practice English outside the classroom even though over half of the students’ family members had the ability to speak English.. Table 3-1 Previous and Present English Learning Experiences Previous English Learning Experiences. YES. NO. Experiences of living in English speaking countries. 6%. 94%. Experiences of English learning before elementary school. 69 %. 31%. English practice opportunity outside the classroom. 32%. 68%. Family members who can speak English. 55%. 45%. 3.3 Instruments In this study, classroom observations provided the researcher detailed information of the activities employed in the classroom of explicit phonics instruction. In addition, teacher’s interview was conducted to collect more insightful information about teachers’ thought and classroom action with an emphasis on explicit phonics teaching. 3.3.1 Classroom Observation From the beginning of the second semester of 2007, the researcher made visits to an elementary school in the northern part of Taiwan to observe on the explicit teaching of phonics in the selected second-grade class. As presented in Table 3-2, there were in total five times of classroom observations to the elementary school, each time with an interval of approximately two to three weeks. The observation time for each visit was 40 minutes, which is based on the Ministry of Education policy that the 33.

(46) class time for elementary school students is 40 minutes per class period. Each time before the classroom observation, lesson plans (see Apendix A) were provided to the researcher by the teacher. The letters that were instructed during the five observation visits covered from Nn to Zz. Table 3-2 Classroom Observation Schedule Observation Date. Letter focus th. First Observation：. March 16. Second Observation：. April 13th 2007. Third Observation： Fourth Observation： Fifth Observation：. th. April 27 May 18 June 8. th. th. 2007. Lesson 1: Nn, Oo Lesson 2: Pp, Qq. 2007. Lesson 3: Rr, Ss, Tt. 2007. Lesson 4: Uu, Vv, Ww. 2007. Lesson 5: Xx, Yy, Zz. 3.3.2 Teacher Interview The purpose of the teacher’s interview is to understand the philosophy, and the methodology of how the teacher organized the phonics instruction in an explicit manner, including the teaching activities employed, as well as teaching reflection thereafter. There are seven questions totally. The interview was conducted after each classroom observation; each time lasted for about 20 minutes (Teacher interview questions are listed in Appendix B).. 3.3.3 Assessment Tasks To investigate students’ progress on the aspects of phonological awareness after they received intensive phonics teaching focusing on blending and segmentation, a pretest and a posttest were carried out at the beginning and at the end of the semester respectively. Students’ phonological awareness progress was measured in the pretest and posttest in terms of their alphabetic knowledge and phonological awareness skills.. 34.