| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 外國語文學系碩博士班 === 92 === This study explored the effectiveness of two phonics programs on phonemic awareness (PA) development, word spelling and word reading abilities of three groups of sixth graders at elementary school. Both phonics programs contained an identical phonics instruction part and a PA training part. The PA training implemented with the two Control Groups included vowel identification, phoneme blending, and phoneme segmentation, while the other approach adopted with the Experimental Group included more PA skills. The pretest-to-posttest gains from PA assessments, spelling assessments, and nonsense-word reading assessments led to the following findings:
1. Both approaches improved these EFL beginners’ PA and spelling ability. However, the program that included more PA skills yielded more gains.
2. Incorporating more PA skills was more helpful to cram-schoolers in terms of PA development and spelling ability. However, including less PA skills benefited more with the PA development of non-cram-schoolers and those who did not have a solid alphabetic knowledge when the research started.
3. The phonics program that contained less PA skills and excluded manipulation with phonogram cards was not sufficient to improve nonsense-word reading ability.
In conclusion, the following suggestions were recommended:
1. PA training should be incorporated in phonics programs so as to foster EFL beginners’ literacy, and should be implemented prior to phonics instruction.
2. English teachers should conduct PA assessment with students so as to decide the components of the PA training. If possible, PA training should be instructed with the use of interesting games, stories, nursery rhymes, and fun activities.
3. After each sequence of phonics rules is instructed, decodable, meaningful texts should be adopted to provide children experiences practicing and internalizing the learned phonics rules.
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