| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立彰化師範大學 === 兒童英語研究所 === 107 === English reading is a complex activity which consists of different developmental stages (Hackney, 1968; Thompson, Tunmer, & Nicholson, 1993; Wyse & Goswami, 2008). In early literacy instruction, the corresponding relationships between letters and sounds are crucial. Learners should have the knowledge of alphabetical printed symbols and phonological sound awareness to decode words (National Reading Panel, 2000). In order to help young language learners build their English skills at a fundamental level, systematic phonics instruction is found to be effective toward helping learners gain the knowledge of letter-sound relationships in the early stages. Such knowledge is the foundation for word recognition and a prerequisite for reading fluency (Adams, 1990; Chard & Osborn, 1999; International Reading Association, 1997; Metsala & Ehri, 1998; Moustafa & Maldonado-Colon, 1999; National Reading Panels, 2000; Villaume & Brabham, 2003).
Besides, in English language teaching, various teaching methods have been proposed. To teach young learners, Total Physical Response (TPR) and the Audio-lingual Method (ALM) have been found to be effective since both of them focus on oral skills with stimulus and response (Karavas, 2014; Larsen-Freeman, 2000; Lin & Chien, 2009; Linse & Nunan, 2005; Richards & Rodgers, 2001). TPR has been used to improve learners’ vocabulary (Fahrurrozi, 2017) and listening comprehension (Hsu, 2014) while ALM has been used to improve learners’ listening (Samawiyah & Saifuddin, 2016) and speaking abilities (Wu, 2013). However, up to the present time, no empirical study has been implemented using Total Physical Response with phonics instruction in Taiwan elementary schools. The feasibility of implementing the TPR method in systematic phonics instruction remains a question. Additionally, no comparative study has been conducted to examine the effectiveness of different teaching methodologies, such as TPR and ALM, integrated in systematic phonics instruction. Therefore, the primary purpose of this study is to measure and compare the effectiveness of TPR and ALM toward implementing systematic phonics instruction to effectively facilitate alphabetic knowledge, phonological awareness and decoding ability among Taiwanese EFL young learners. Another purpose of the current study is to investigate the participants’ attitudes toward the respective systematic phonics instruction.
The participants were 72 third graders from three homogenous classes in one elementary school. They were randomly assigned to the control group receiving no treatment, Experimental Group 1 (TPR group) receiving the TPR systematic phonics instruction and Experimental Group 2 (ALM group) receiving the ALM systematic phonics instruction. The two experimental groups received 35-minute systematic phonics instruction once a week, with the total instruction lasting for eight weeks. The instruments included a background questionnaire, a reading test extracted from Cambridge English Test: Starters (YLE Starters), an alphabetic knowledge test, a phonological awareness test, a word decoding test and questionnaires of the participants’ attitudes toward the respective intervention.
Results showed that both TPR and ALM in systematic phonics treatments were significantly effective on facilitating EFL young learners’ alphabetic knowledge, phonological awareness and decoding ability. However, the major differences between the respective TPR and ALM instruction lay in the participants’ alphabetic knowledge and phonological awareness performance gain, showing the TPR group significantly outperformed the ALM group. In addition, judging from the descriptive statistics, the participants in the TPR group had greater improvements on the three early literacy skills. As for the participants’ perceptions, the data collected from the questionnaires indicated that learners receiving the TPR systematic phonics instruction had significantly more positive attitudes than the ones receiving the ALM systematic phonics instruction in terms of the three aspects of Keller’s (1987, 2008) ARCS model, which are Attention, Relevance and Confidence. As in the satisfaction level, the TPR group still scored higher than the ALM group, suggesting the positive effects brought by the TPR instruction.
Based on the findings, it is suggested that EFL elementary school teachers could implement TPR or ALM in systematic phonics instruction to teach young learners the early literacy skills, namely alphabetic knowledge, phonological awareness and word decoding. In terms of the teaching methods adopted in the instruction, Total Physical Response can reduce learning stress and increase learners’ motivation and curiosity to learn.
|
|---|
