Abstract
The study examined the effects of explicit phonics instruction and authentic readings on EFL elementary pupils. The subjects, consisting of 41 third-grade students who had never known about phonics in an urban elementary school in Tainan City, were divided into a Control Group and an Experimental Group randomly.This study consisted of two stages. In the first stage, all these pupils had to receive a 20 hours of program of phonics and reading including 12 hours of explicit phonics instruction and 8 hours of practicing reading meaningful sentences. The aim of this stage was to provide these third-grade elementary pupils with the ability to decode English letters, words, and sentences, and to comprehend English words, and sentences. In the second stage, the researcher gave the pupils tests in order to provide empirical evidence for the effect of explicit phonics instruction and authentic readings on EFL elementary pupils.
The findings of the study are summarized as follows:
1. Intensive and explicit phonics instruction in 20 hours (12 hours in receiving phonics instruction, and 8 hours in practicing reading sentences collections) has produced a positive effect on EFL young learners’ ability to decode letter sounds and words.
2. Intensive and explicit phonics instruction in 20 hours is helpful to EFL young learners in their ability to recognize words, comprehend sentences and stories.
3. Although the expected direction is detected, young phonics beginning learners who practice reading stories did not perform significantly better than those who practiced reading sentences without contextual relationship among them.
In conclusion, this study shows that with the aid of learning phonics explicitly and practicing reading proper meaningful sentences, beginning elementary school readers could read English that fits for their levels independently. And through learning to decode and comprehend English words, sentences or simple texts, the EFL young learners appeared to raise their interest and confidence in learning English.
| Date of Award | 2004 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Supervisor | Hui-Tzu Min (Supervisor) |