A Study on the Effects of Phonics Instruction on the Decoding and Encoding Performances of Junior High School EFL Students In Taiwan researcher: 吳佩真 reporter: 徐家慧 instructor: 鍾榮富教授

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 background and motivation of the study In the past, pronunciation was considered to be a liguistic form, instead of language function. In 1980, phonics instruction become an essensial feature of pronuciation teaching. Phonics proponents indicate that once learners learn the letter-sound correspondences, they should be able to decode and encode unfamiliar printed words through prediction.(Kuo, 2003)

- Phonics plays the role of helping children to recognize words in reading and spelling programs.(Lin, 2001; Kuo, 2003) -Recent studies on ESL/EFL pronunciation teaching show a common trend of -familiarizing non-native students with English letter-sound relationships(Krielder, 1972; Paulson& Bruden, 1977; Morley, 1991)

1.2 purposes of study to investigate the effectiveness of phonics instruction prior to formal English instruction to explore which phonics rule is more familiar to junior high school stuents To probe the relationships between students' oral and written performances and their proficiency levels

1.3 Research Questions 1.Do the subjects' genders show significant effects on their spoken and written performance? 2.Do the periods of the previous English learning experience significantlu influence students' spoken and written performance? 3.Does the nationality of students' phonics teachers affect students' apoken and written performance?

4.Do Chinese EFL students have better ideas about English stress after having received phonics instruction? 5.Do students decode multi-syllables as well as monosyllables after having received phonics instruction? 6.Do students' performances in the oral test correlate to those of the written test?

Chapter 2 Literature Review

2.1 The problem of orthography O'Grady & Dobrovsky (1988) indicated that English orthography has five problems. a) Some letters do not represent any sound in a particular word, e.g.: through, sigh. b) A group of two or more letters are used together to represent a sound, e.g.: think, chip, ship.

c) A single letter can represent a cluster of two or more sounds, e.g.: saxophone, exile. d) The same letter can represent different sounds in different words, e.g.: on, bone, one. e) The same sound can be representd by different letters in different words, e.g.: rude, loop, soup, Sue, to, two.

2.2 A review of the phonics instruction in the U.S Johnson & Pearson (1978) stated that phonics instruction is the means which helps the child to pronounce an unfamiliar printed word, and consequently understand it. In discussing with Chall's (1967) review of begining reading instruction, Stahl (2002) identified three types of phonics instrutional approaches available since 1960.

2.3The Constructivist Approaches Children go through a series of stages of word recognition and spelling. Bear & Barone (1989) and Stahl (2002) suggested tht children should be taught to construct their own knowledge about words, at least part of the time, in order to develop these concepts of how words are put together. In the 1990s, two contemporary approaches were developed, the spelling-based approach (Bear et al., 2000; Henderson, 1981).

2.4 The approach Intergrating the Concept of "Phonological Awareness" It can be defined as the ability to recognize units of spoken language smaller than the syllable. It may include blending, segmentation, deletion, word-to-word matching, and/or sound to word matching( Adams, 1990; Stahl, 2002; Yopp,1988).

2.5The Role of Phonics in Taiwan's EFL Environment Recently, EFL educators in Taiwan, however, have stressed the importance of phonics instruction. The characteristic of letter-sound correspondence in phonics has been adopted to teach young learners' pronunciation. As a result, researches on phonics instruction and teaching material have increased.

Chapter 3 Methodology

3.1 subject & instrucment sbject: 80 first-grade students in Yang-ming Junior High School. The students came from two classes and at least have learnt English for 1 year. Instruments: questionnaire and testing materials Test materials include oral production test,a decoding activty and written dictation test, an encoding exercise.

3.2 The Questionnaire The questionnaire consisted of five items. Personal information English learning experience Period: the length of time that the subjects spent learning English before entering junior high school Phonics learning experience Nationality: the nationality of the teachers who taught the subjects English phonics rules

The Four Types of Vowel Patterns in th oral and Written Tests Item TypeVowel patterns Single Vowel Letters (SVL)long a/short a, long e/short e, long i/short i, long o/short o, lohng u/shot u Diphthongs (DIP)oi, ou, oy Vowel Digraphs (VD)ai, au, aw, aw, ee, ea, oa, long oo R-colored Vpwels (RV)ar, ur

3.3 Procedures Designing the Questionnaire of Subjects' Background Information and English Learing Experience Designing the Oral Production Testing Material and the Written Testing Material Sampling and Administering the Questionnaire Conduction the Tape-recprding of the Oral Production Test

Conducting the Written Dictation Test Classifying and Scoring the Data Dividing Subjects According to the Test Scores and the English Learning Experience Computing the Scores of the Oral and Written Tests and the Results Data Analysis

Chapter 4 Result and discussion

4.1 Basic Data Analysis from the Questionnaire The questionnaire was a self-report ine designed to obtain students' background information about learning English before their formal English education in junior high. A total of 60 complete sets of data were valid for data analysis.

4.2 Descriptive Statistics of the Three Proficiency Groups' Total Scores of all the Test NMeanSDMinMax LPG IPG HPG Total Note. Total score of the three test are 197.

4.3 Descriptive Statistics for the Oral Pre- test among the Three Groups Note. Total score in the oral pre-test= 64 NMeanSDMinMax LPG IPG HPG Total

4.4 Descriptive Statistics for the Oral Post-test among the Three Groups NMeanSDMinMax LPG IPG HPG Total Note. Total score in the oral post-test= 64

4.5 A Comparison of the Oral Pre- and Post-test Scores Based on the results of the accuracy frequency of stressd vowels, the following were most frequently pronounced appropriatelt in the oral pre-test: debate, freedom, Easter, peaceful,distance, noodle, foolish, and barber. Among these words, most of the head vowels belong to the VV strings, including ee, ea, and oo.

Chapter 5 Findings and conclusion

Findings No significant difference exists between the students' performance in the oral and written tests, nor does any exist between male and female students. The findings indicate that subjects' genders have no correlation to their decoding and encoding performance. No significant difference was found in the oral and the written tests of subjects who learned English over different periods of time before formal English exposure, The results indicate that prior English learning experience does not correlate to students' decoding and encoding abilities.

No significant differences exist between the oral and the written tests among subjects whose phonics teachers came from different countries. These finding indicate that there was no relationship between the nationalities od students' phonics teachers and the students' abilities to decode and encode English phonics. The HPG subjects were found to have significantly accuracy frequency in the stressed vowels of the multi- syllabic words. The results show that knowledge of syllable and stress patterns of English is developed only when the students have had some appreciable capacity to decode and encode both spoken and written texts in the language.

The perecentage of accuarcy in reading monosyllabic words was higher than that of reading multi-syllables in all the proficiency groups. The results indcate that all the subjects could decode monosyllables better than multi- syllables. The IPG and the HPG subjects' performances show significant correlation between the oral and written tests. Thus, their deciding abilities closely parallel their encoding abilitises. The subjects were found to have better performance when they decoding the words of single vowel letters and vowel digraphs. They also perfprmed better when they encoded the words of diphthongs and r-colored vowels. The findings indicate that studemts might have different performance for different sound patterns in the language.