| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立屏東大學 === 英語學系碩士班 === 103 === This study aims to explore the effects of integrative phonics instruction on EFL low-achievers' alphabet knowledge, phonemic awareness, and spelling ability. It also investigates students’ attitudes toward English learning, perceptions on phonics knowledge, and the responses to the remedial program after receiving the Integrative Phonics Remedial Instruction Program.
In this study, the participants were 6 fifth-graders in Pingtung County who came from the underprivileged minority family and did not pass the English Remedial Instruction-technology-based testing made by the Minister of Education of Taiwan. All of the participants received the explicit phonics approach integrated with the using of the graded phonics reader in the implicit approach for two months (two sessions a week and each session for 80 minutes after school). Data in this study were collected from the pre/post alphabet knowledge tests, the pre/post phonemic awareness tests, the pre/post spelling tests, the pre/post-study questionnaires the student’s interviews and the classroom observation notes. The former three were analyzed with pair samples sign test. The students’ responses in the pre/post questionnaires were measured through the descriptive statistics. The interview and the classroom observation notes were used to support the researcher’s interpretation of the findings.
The results show that with the repeated practice of the words embedded with the alphabet knowledge learned in the explicit phonics teaching stage, the students’ phonics performance in terms of alphabet knowledge and phonemic awareness progressed significantly. Later on, with constant reading of the phonics reader in the implicit phonics teaching stage, most students’ alphabet knowledge and phonemic awareness were reinforced. In this study, the students of the higher gained score got familiar with the spelling pattern, while the student of the lower gained score learned the letter-sound correspondence knowledge. Therefore, they also performed significantly better in the post spelling test. Meanwhile, most students held the positive attitude toward the Integrative Phonics Remedial Instruction Program, in that the remedial program improved and consolidated their phonics knowledge, changed their way of memorizing English words, and motivated them in learning English. Furthermore, the participants thought that their English performance was enhanced after they received the Integrative Phonics Remedial Instruction Program.
Based on the results, the researchers proposed pedagogical implications for language teachers to adopt the integrative phonics remedial instruction to help low-achievers develop their phonics knowledge and English self-learning ability. In addition, EFL elementary teachers could choose the phonics reader as the supplementary materials for phonics teaching as well. Last but not least, teaching activities and the pace of instruction should be flexibly adjusted according to the low-achievers’ absorption rate and learning difficulties. In that, teaching students to completely understand the target phonics rules is more important than teaching them to finish reading the whole phonics materials. Finally, more participants and a longer duration of the instruction are suggested in future studies.
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