| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立台北師範學院 === 兒童英語教育研究所 === 93 === The goal of this study is to evaluate the effects of training in phoneme segmentation on Taiwanese EFL first-graders’ early reading ability. Thirty students from an elementary school in Taipei City were selected to participate in the present study. Fifteen subjects were assigned to the experimental group (the phoneme segmentation group) and the other fifteen students were in the control group (the phonics group). These children had no extra English learning experiences outside the EFL classroom at the elementary school before and during the ten-week experimental span. The experimental group received training in segmenting words into phonemes, as well as training in correspondence between letter names and letter sounds. The control group received only the training in letter names and letter sounds. The experiment of the respective conditions lasted for twenty 20-minute class period over a ten-week period of time. Subjects’ development of early reading skill was measured by the tests on letter-name and letter-sound knowledge, phoneme segmentation ability and word recognition ability both in the pretest and posttest.
Results indicated that after the intervention, the experimental group outperformed significantly the control group in overall early reading ability, phoneme segmentation ability and word recognition ability in the posttest. In addition, comparison of within group performance between the pretest and posttest revealed that the experimental group improved significantly in overall early reading ability, phoneme segmentation ability and word recognition ability, while the control group did not make any significant improvement on any of the three measures. However, both groups did not improve significantly in letter-name and letter-sound correspondence. The reason may be due to “ceiling effect” as shown in the pretest.
The findings of this study are consistent with those in previous studies on English-speaking L1 children. It suggested that training in phoneme segmentation, combined with phonics instruction, can significantly better help improve Taiwanese EFL children’s emergent literacy in L2.
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