A Pilot Study: The Impact of Phonics Instruction Application on Phonemic Awareness within Reading and Vocabulary Abilities of Elementary School English Teaching

Abstract

This study investigated whether phonemic awareness within vocabulary and reading abilities changed after phonics instruction. Pre-test, treatment of phonics instruction, and post-test were implemented to measure the impact of phonics instruction on English teaching in an elementary school. Fifty Chinese students who performed little English proficiency at the beginning of second grade participated in this study. This study, conducted as a pilot-study before a main one investigating two groups of experimental group and control group, had a quantitative experiment design for a group of fifty students exploring Pre-test and Post-test effects of two different conditions: phonemic awareness within vocabulary and reading abilities, respectively. SPSS 19.0 was employed in quantitative data analysis. Overall, it was proved in this pilot-study that the EFL learners who experienced phonics instruction class had more meaningful improvement and higher average scores on their vocabulary and reading abilities. From the test results and the interviews with the students and their parents, it is indicated that the EFL learners’ phonemic awareness within reading and vocabulary abilities has been increased. At pre-test, no students performed well in 1) reading short passages as a test of authentic word pronunciation and phonemic awareness in distinguishing words within monograms and 2) oral English test examining English conversation and also vocabulary recognition. At post-test, the average scores of the students with phonics instruction class were improved meaningfully by around 10% in the two different individual conditions that the ones in the Pre-test. Implications in this study are that phonics instruction would be needed for increasing phonemic awareness as well as the significance of phonics instruction in English language teaching.