The Effect of Prior Phonics Learning Experiences on Fifth Graders' Phonics Performance
| Autor: | Yen-chen Hsu, 許艷真 |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2017 |
| Druh dokumentu: | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Popis: | 105 The Effect of Prior Phonics Learning Experiences on Fifth Graders’ Phonic Performance English Abstract Elementary school students in Taiwan start to learn English along with Phonics from the third grade on. According to the Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum for the English subject, students are expected to acquire the knowledge of letter-sound correspondences for spelling. However, it requires a better understanding of whether students are equipped with this competence and how they develop this competence for spelling. The present study is designed to examine the effects of EFL students’ prior phonics learning experiences on 1) phonics performance, including the discrimination of initial consonants, final consonants, and medial lax vowels, and the spelling of consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words, 2) perception towards the difficulty level of spelling, and 3) spelling strategies. In addition, students’ spelling errors were identified and analyzed. The students consisted of 94 EFL students from the fifth-grade of an elementary school in Kaohsiung City. They were divided into four groups: 1) NAS: no after-school English learning, 2) ASNP: after-school English learning without phonics instruction, 3) ASIP, after-school English learning with integrated phonics instruction, and 4) ASSP, after-school English learning with separate phonics instruction. The instruments included four phonics performance tests along with a questionnaire. The data were analyzed with a quantitative approach. The results of the present study are reported below: a) Phonics performance tests: ASNP, ASIP and ASSP significantly outperformed NAS in the discrimination of initial consonants, final consonants, medial lax vowels, and the spelling of CVC words. Yet, there were no significant differences among ASNP, ASIP and ASSP in the first three tests, while in the test of spelling of CVC words ASSP scored significantly higher than ASNP. b) Perception of the difficulty level of spelling: NAS perceived spelling the most difficult, whereas ASSP perceived it the easiest. c) Spelling strategies: The most frequently used strategy was “reading aloud a word and its letter names repeatedly” (71/%), while the least frequently used strategy was “applying phonics rules to spell” (20%). In addition, ASSP was the group that used phonics rules most frequently for spelling, while no students in NAS used this strategy. d) Analysis of spelling errors: 1) the students made more errors in medial lax vowels than in consonants; 2) the most frequent errors in vowels resulted from a confusion of letter-sounds with letter-names; 3) errors in consonant digraphs occurred more frequently than those in simple consonants; 4) for simple consonants, students made more errors in the final position than in the initial position; for consonant digraphs, in contrast, more errors were found in the initial position than in the end. Three possible reasons for those errors are interference of the native language, positions of a phoneme and manner of articulation. Three pedagogical implications of the present study are provided. First, separate phonics instruction on a regular basis is beneficial for enhancing students’ letter-sound identification and spelling. Second, phonemic awareness, segmenting in particular, is severely lacking in the present phonics instruction for both at-school and after-school English classes. Last, textbook writers and English teachers should offer more activities to help students be more aware of easily confused phonemes. It is recommended that the American and British curricula, a separate phonics instruction integrated with phonemic awareness training can be included in Taiwan’s English subject curriculum. |
| Databáze: | Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations |
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