The Effect Of Phonics Instruction On Word Decoding And Reading Comprehension Among EFL Low-Achievers In Middle Schools

The present study focuses on teaching EFL low-achievers the sound-to-letter correspondence through phonics instruction.Although recent English education in China advocates balanced development,there remains a disparity in rural areas where fundamental education for students from the countryside is quite basic,which results in large failure in English education.Phonics is a method to teach early reading by training the learners' letter-sound correspondence.It is a popular approach in learning alphabetic languages such as English for first language learners.The study aims to explore the effect of phonics instruction applied to English low-achievers at a junior high school in a countryside town on word decoding and reading comprehension.30 ninth graders who were of low English proficiency levels were recruited to a supplementary phonics instruction twice a week over a span of seven weeks.The research design involves pretesting the learners' word decoding ability and reading comprehension before they received the phonics instruction and post-testing them right after the instruction.Survey questionnaires and qualitative interviews were also conducted.The results revealed that:(1)Phonics instruction significantly improved word decoding ability of low-achievers in the junior high school.Paired-sample T-test of pretest and post-test shows that the progress reached a significant level(t=-14.857,Sig.=.000<0.05);(2)There is no significant improvement in reading comprehension under the phonics instruction in the junior high school.This may be because the Chinese students lack equivalent sound-meaning correspondence,and the students cannot comprehend the word or text even though they can decode it correctly.(3)The main difficulties the subjects encountered in the phonics instruction are decoding variants of vowels,polysyllabic words,irregular spelling patterns and word combination.(4)Phonics instruction could stimulate interest in English learning.Their phonological awareness was greatly developed during the instruction,which lowered the degree of difficulty in word decoding.The results showed that phonics could facilitate the low-achievers to decode the words correctly and motivate their interest in English learning,and teachers need to make more effort to help the students learn phonics in a more meaningful context to build letter-sound-meaning connections.