The Effects Of Explicit Phonics Instruction On Chinese Beginning EFL Learners' Word Reading Competency:A Case Study

The study aims to explore the effectiveness of explicit phonics instruction on Chinese beginning EFL learners' word reading competency by employing a case study approach.Two four-grade primary school students participated in the study and were instructed in letter-sound correspondences of five long vowels and syllabification skills for twelve weeks,from November 2017 to March 2018.During the period,they attended the one-hour phonics class once a week.The teaching comprised of two stages with different objectives.The focus of the first six weeks was enhancing their knowledge of letter-sound correspondences,and the syllabification skills were added as another focus in the second six weeks.Quantitative data was collected through a pretest and a posttest conducted before and after the phonics intervention to check the improvements of their word reading competency.Besides,teaching diaries and an interview after the phonics teaching were utilized to further test and verify the quantitative data.The results showed that the participants' monosyllabic word reading skills improved obviously in both word reading test and continuous text reading test.But the short term phonics intervention without systematic instruction of syllabification had little effect on the participants'polysyllabic word reading skills.The results proved that short term phonics instruction was able to improve Chinese beginning EFL learners,monosyllabic word reading competency by developing the awareness of identifying letter-sound correspondences in words.It also implied that explicit syllabification instruction should be an indispensable part of phonics programs.The study suggests implications for phonics teaching methodologies and directions of future research on phonics in China.