| Summary: | 碩士 === 南台科技大學 === 應用英語系 === 99 === The present study attempted to explore the effects of phoneme and onset-rime based phonics instruction (PORBIT) on English as foreign language elementary learners’ word decoding skills. The specific purposes were (a) to explore the effectiveness of PORBIT on the English learners in phonemic awareness and in word recognition, (b) to examine the progress of the students’ performance on phonological awareness, and (c) to compare the efficiency of PORBIT between the average skilled learners and the less proficient learners.
Twenty-eight Grade 4 students, mostly in their partial alphabetic stage of English learning, were equally divided into a control group and an experimental group. The subjects in the experimental group were further divided into two subgroups: average learners and at-risk learners. All students received the pretest before the implementation of the treatment and were instructed for 12 weeks (sixty minutes per week). The experimental group received phonological awareness based phonics instruction while the control group received phonics instruction only. A posttest was administered after the intervention.
The results of this quasi-experimental study were summarized as follows:
1. Based on the result of the independent samples t-test, the students who received PORBIT treatment outperformed their counterparty on phonological awareness.
2. With respect to the progress of students’ word recognition, the result revealed that there was no significant difference between the two groups.
3. By comparing within-group progress, result of phonemic awareness assessment was statistical. A large size effect for difference between testing times was found.
4. Although the results of paired sample t-test showed the at-risk learners and the average learners made a statistical gain after the treatment, the at-risk learners appeared to benefit the most.
Although the participants showed no significant progress in word recognition, the findings revealed that the PORBIT instruction appeared to have merits on the overall performance of phonological awareness. It was hoped that the findings of this study offered an insight into English teaching and learning at the introductory level. Suggestions were put forward for future researchers.
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