Phonics Instruction Research Articles

What are we really teaching? The implications of including phonics instruction in Group Guided Reading

Background: In the context of the ongoing crisis in early reading literacy in South Africa, this article gives insight into teacher practices which reduce learners’ opportunities to read continuous text for meaning.Aim: This ethnographic study investigated the microcosm of teacher practices in well-resourced environments.Setting: A purposive sample was drawn of three Grade One teachers in former Model C primary schools for intensive investigation of their literacy teaching practices. A pilot study established that a literacy teaching event resembling Group Guided Reading was attended every day by every learner in these classrooms and therefore provided the focal event in the research.Method: Micro-ethnographic classroom observations, with accompanying video recordings and transcriptions were the primary data sources. Interviews provided narrative and descriptive data. Data were analysed by means of qualitative content analysis and discourse analysis.Results: Findings suggested that the introduction of flashcards and texts designed for phonics practice into a methodology designed to promote reading for meaning has a cumulative impact on the time teachers spend on discussion, modelling comprehension strategies and silent reading. Potentially this limits learners to only one of the four roles of a reader, that is, a reader as code breaker.Conclusion: Findings caution against teachers making changes to the requirements of explicit teaching methodologies. The aims of Group Guided Reading are not achievable when phonics instruction reduces engagement with continuous text.Contribution: This article, by critiquing a practice, encourages teachers and teacher educators to consider the balance between whole-language and phonics-based approaches.

Grapheme–phoneme correspondence learning in parrots

Abstract Symbolic representation acquisition is the complex cognitive process consisting of learning to use a symbol to stand for something else. A variety of non-human animals can engage in symbolic representation learning. One particularly complex form of symbol representation is the associations between orthographic symbols and speech sounds, known as grapheme–phoneme correspondence. To date, there has been little evidence that animals can learn this form of symbolic representation. Here, we evaluated whether an Umbrella cockatoo (Cacatua alba) can learn letter-speech correspondence using English words. The bird-participant was trained with phonics instruction and then tested on pairs of index cards while the experimenter spoke the word. The words were unknown to the bird and the experimenter was blinded to the correct card position. The cockatoo’s accuracy (M = 71%) was statistically significant. Further, we found a strong correlation between the bird’s word-identification success and the number of overlapping letters between words, where the more overlapping letters between words, the more likely the cockatoo answered incorrectly. Our results strongly suggest that parrots may have the ability to learn grapheme–phoneme correspondences.

How Chinese Learners Decode L2 English Words: Evidence from a Phonics Instruction Program

AbstractThe teaching of L2 phonics, defined here as explicit instruction in the symbol‐sound correspondences of a second or foreign language, has been enjoying growing popularity in recent years. This is associated with the reemphasis of phonological decoding in different aspects of L2 learning, and learners' difficulty in developing L2 decoding proficiency. However, there has been limited research on L2 phonics instruction, particularly qualitative evidence exploring the nature of learners' decoding errors. For Chinese EFL learners, past studies often stress the negative impact of their morphemic L1 on decoding English words. In contrast, the potential influence of Pinyin knowledge (an alphabetic system for transcribing the spoken Chinese language) has often been overlooked, despite constituting an important aspect of their literacy. This study reports the effects of an English phonics instruction program, conducted with Chinese university EFL learners, on different categories of English graphemes, classified according to (a) whether they are present or absent in Pinyin, and (b) if present, whether their pronunciations are similar or different across Pinyin and English. In a quasi‐experimental design, a group of first‐year English majors (n = 71) received 12 weeks of English phonics instruction, while a comparison group (n = 67) received 12 weeks of English phonology instruction without phonics. The results show that the phonics group made significantly more progress in decoding some graphemes, especially Pinyin‐absent graphemes. Qualitative analysis of participants' decoding identifies three types of common errors in decoding, with the impact of Pinyin being highlighted. Implications for the design of L2 phonics instruction programs are drawn.

Disputing recent attempts to reject the evidence in favour of systematic phonics instruction

AbstractTwo recent articles from authors in Britain have attempted to show that the evidence in favour of systematic phonics in initial literacy instruction is weak; here, their arguments are disputed. Bowers (‘Reconsidering the evidence that systematic phonics is more effective than alternative methods of reading instruction’, Educational Psychology Review, 32, 2020) attempts to show that there is little or no research evidence that systematic phonics instruction is more effective than other commonly used methods. Detailed inspection shows that his analysis appears flawed. Wyse and Bradbury (‘Reading wars or reading reconciliation’, Review of Education, 10, 2022) offer four strands of evidence which, they suggest, undermine the case for systematic phonics teaching. However, they themselves admit they cannot draw conclusions from two of those strands; their survey of teachers in primary schools in England is unrepresentative and therefore unreliable; and their analysis of previous systematic reviews adopts such unnecessarily restrictive criteria that its conclusions cannot be accepted. Context and implicationsRationale for this studyEvidence in favour of using systematic phonics instruction as part of the teaching of initial literacy has grown steadily for decades, as shown by Brooks (2022). However, other specialists in the field have disputed whether the evidence on the effectiveness of systematic phonics is reliable.Why this mattersIf that evidence were proved inadequate, much official policy on, and widespread practice in, initial literacy teaching would be cast in doubt. This article therefore analyses two recent critiques from British authors (Bowers, 2020; Wyse & Bradbury, 2022), and attempts to demonstrate that those critiques fail in their attempts to show that the evidence on phonics is unreliable.ImplicationsGiven this, in the current state of knowledge the evidence in favour of systematic phonics seems robust, and the key implication for teachers of initial literacy is therefore that systematic phonics instruction should remain an essential element within their repertoire. Furthermore, institutions of teacher education should ensure that intending teachers of early years are trained to provide phonics teaching that is soundly based on research evidence.

Efficacy of English Phonics Instruction in Helping EFL Students to Decode Vowel Digraph Letters

The current study aimed to disclose how effective Phonics instruction is in increasing speech accuracy and glimpsing at students' perspectives on phonics learning in the classroom. This study applied quasi-experimental research involving 30 Department of Literature students learning English as a foreign language. The researcher also used the questionnaire to glimpse their perspective on phonics instruction. This study discovered that phonics learning significantly improved pronunciation accuracy and the ability to decode vowel digraph <ai>. In addition, students also have a positive view of phonics learning, which is one of the important materials at the beginning of the introduction of foreign language systems which helps them produce accurate utterances and helps improve literacy. The current study considers that phonics instruction needs to get important attention to become a solution to student learning problems.

데이터기반개별화(DBI) 한글파닉스 교수가 초등학교 지적장애 학생의 읽기 성취도에 미치는 효과

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of Data-Based Individualized(DBI) Hangul phonics instruction has on reading achievement(Hangul reading, alphabet knowledge and decoding). Three elementary students with intellectual disabilities in grades 3 to 5 participated in this study furthermore a multi-probe design across participants was used to investigate the effects of both the intervention and maintenance. A researcher provided a DBI hangul phonics program to the student participants 3 times per week, 30 minutes per day a total of 20 to 38 sessions was delivered to the students. Researcher-developed hangul CBM measures were used consistently across baseline, intervention, and maintenance phases in addition standardized tests on alphabet knowledge and decoding were used before and after the intervention. The results of this study showed that the level of hangul reading of the students was improved at the intervention phase compared to its level at the baseline phase, and the effects were maintained after the phase was completed. In addition, post-test scores on alphabet knowledge and decoding were higher than the pre-test scores. However, the degree of improvement of decoding was varied across individual students. These results imply the positive effects of using DBI hangul phonics instruction to enhance reading achievement of elementary school students with intellectual disabilities. Based on the findings-discussion, limitations and suggestions for future research were suggested.

Making the transfer: preservice teachers’ technical and pedagogical knowledge of phonics instruction

ABSTRACT The decades-long and contentious debate over how students are taught to read centers around the role that phonics and alphabetic code-related skills have in reading instruction. Some claim that these skills are not prioritized in most elementary classrooms because teacher education programs do not adequately prepare preservice teachers (PSTs) to teach children how to read. Although scholars do not yet agree on the knowledge and skills needed to effectively teach children to read, the current body of research around teacher education of phonics instruction is minimal and overrepresents PSTs’ acquisition of technical knowledge. As such, in this study we drew on theories of practice-based teaching practices to employ a series of three instructor-created assessments to better understand the connection between the technical and pedagogical knowledge required to teach phonics and code-related skills. Findings indicate that assessments of technical knowledge alone did not accurately illuminate PSTs’ misunderstandings. Further, results show that PSTs who were successful on technical measurements of phonics instruction were not always successful on the pedagogical assessments.

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

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.

Explicit and Differentiated Phonics Instruction on Pupils’ Literacy Skills in Gambian Lower Basic Schools

Instructional procedures in literacy skills in Gambian classrooms often adopt the conventional direct approach which includes spelling-reading-dictation without due attention to the sound/letter connection. Although literacy skills in English remain the fundamental proof of formal education in the Gambia, proficiency in reading and writing skills is very low among most pupils in the lower basic schools. Phonics instruction reinforces the letter-sound relationship and improves literacy skills and spelling. Although phonics instruction has been found to be effective for teaching literacy skills to EFL students, there has not been much research on phonics instruction in Gambian classrooms. This study investigated the effects of explicit and differentiated phonics instructional strategies on achievement in literacy skills. The moderating effect of parental involvement was equally examined. The study adopted a pretest-posttest, control group quasi-experimental design using 164 pupils from four randomly selected schools, and treatment lasted six weeks. The result showed a significant main effect of treatment on pupils’ achievement in writing (F (2; 125) = 65.485) and reading (F (2; 125) = 26.67). Participants in explicit phonics instruction obtained the highest achievement score (x = 28.4), differentiated phonics instruction (x =16.3), and control (x = 13.03). Parental involvement had no significant main effect on pupils’ achievement in literacy skills. The two-way interaction effect was not significant. Therefore, language teachers should adopt these strategies to improve the quality of instruction and proficiency in literacy skills in Gambian lower basic schools.

The Effect of English Teaching on the Acquisition of English Vowel System: The Case of Chinese Learners of English from Zhejiang Province in China

As an important part of the phonological system, vowel pronunciation receives a lot of attention. Teaching and learning are important parts of a person's English vowel system. It is therefore necessary to examine the current state of students' vowel knowledge and skills and the current state of vowel teaching in order to better guide the teaching of English. This paper focuses on the impact of English language teaching on the English vowel system, using Zhejiang, China as an example. The research study included the collection of pronunciation data from respondents and a linguistic background survey in the form of a questionnaire. Based on the results, it specifically explored the vowel pronunciation of different subgroups (English majors and non-English majors, native speakers and respondents) and the pedagogical causes of the formation of pronunciation characteristics. It has been found that systematic phonics instruction does help students to pronounce vowels correctly, and that instruction does mitigate factors such as negative native language transfer, helping students to develop a vowel system that is closer to that of their native speakers.

Professional development for the science of reading

Despite training in phonics and phonemic awareness during literacy methods courses, preservice teachers indicate having a limited understanding of how to apply these two critical components of reading in their own classrooms. As preservice teachers enter the classroom, they will need support from principals, literacy professionals, and colleagues to provide effective instruction in phonics and phonemic awareness. Stacey Bose proposes a three-tiered support system to provide a continuum of professional learning as preservice teachers transition from the university to the classroom.

Synthetic Phonics in Spanish Bilingual Education: Spelling Mistakes Analysis

Reading and writing in English from early ages is both a need and a must. The search of an effective learning methodology to teach early literacy has made the application of the Synthetic Phonics method to expand, regardless of the lack of agreement concerning its results. This study is aimed at showing whether this method is effective or not in bilingual educational centres of Madrid (Spain), focussing on the written skills of 640 students, aged 8-9. The errors committed in a 15-frequenly-used-word dictation have been classified according to Corder’s taxonomy. The non-parametric statistic results show that there are differences in the errors made by the students without specific method instruction (less errors) compared to those students with Synthetic Phonics instruction. However, these differences have lower level of association and do not indicate a relevant direction. Therefore, it could be concluded that Synthetic Phonics does not seem to guarantee an efficient learning of spelling for the Spanish students. There is a need to adapt the Synthetic Phonics method for learners from bilingual schools, as well as to investigate the efficiency of other methodologies to teach writing in English at early stages of literacy.

Nature immersions: teaching reading through a real-world curriculum

AbstractDebates about teaching reading have long been a part of educational vernacular, frequently reduced to polarised views about phonics. This attention can unnecessarily divert from the cumulative skills required for learning to read and comprehensive research, which indicates the positive influence of systematic phonics instruction on students’ reading outcomes. Australian education has recently moved beyond these reading wars to include explicit phonics instruction in a reformed national English Curriculum. This provides an opportune time to engage preservice teachers entering the workforce with strategies that explicitly teach these skills while nurturing young people’s ecological consciousness through positive nature connections. With this focus in mind, a participatory action research project involving preservice teachers was undertaken, from which an Eco-Conceptual Framework ensued. The project put immersive activities in place, promoting transdisciplinary ways to develop learners’ connections with nature using images collected from participants’ real world when learning to read. Results indicate that action research energised preservice teachers’ perceived knowledge, self-efficacy about teaching early reading utilising place and skills in designing visual resources. It brings attention to the critical influence of preservice teachers’ dispositions and preferred natural spaces on what images are collected and offered when designing early reading activities utilising the natural world.

Cognitive Flexibility + Phonics Intervention Effects on Reading Gains

This is the second in series of studies designed to test direct and conditional effects of embedded cognitive practice in phonics instruction. Students identified in winter of kindergarten with minimal alphabet knowledge were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: explicit phonics (Plain) (n = 28) or explicit phonics with embedded cognitive flexibility practice (Flex) (n = 29). The core of both conditions was an explicit structured literacy approach: the Flex condition was differentiated by brief cognitive flexibility practice switching letter or word dimensions. Instruction was delivered individually over a six-week period. In spite of Covid-19 impacts, both treatment groups exhibited significant gains on reading outcomes. However, there were no significant differences between the conditions on growth in decoding, encoding, or cognitive flexibility. Future research should consider the timing and design of instruction to determine how cognitive abilities, as well as alphabet knowledge, contribute to acquisition of early reading skills.

Legislating Phonics: Settled Science or Political Polemics?

In this commentary, we identify a phonics-first ideology and its polemical distortions of research and science to promote legislation that constrains and diminishes the teaching of reading. We affirm our own, and a majority of reading professionals’, commitment to teaching phonics. However, we argue that phonics instruction is more effective when embedded in a more comprehensive program of literacy instruction that accommodates students’ individual needs and multiple approaches to teaching phonics—a view supported by substantial research. After summarizing the politicization of phonics in the United States, we critique a legislated training course for teachers in Tennessee as representative of how a phonics-first ideology is expressed polemically for political purposes. We contrast it with a more collaboratively developed, balanced, nonlegislative approach in the previous governor’s administration. Specifically, the training course (a) makes an unfounded claim that there is a national reading crisis that can be traced to insufficient or inappropriate phonics instruction; (b) distorts, misrepresents, or omits relevant research findings and recommendations, most prominently from the report of the National Reading Panel; (c) inaccurately suggests that “balanced literacy instruction” is “whole language” instruction in disguise; and (d) wrongly claims that its views of phonics are based on a settled science of reading.

Language and self-regulation: Interrelated sources of disparities in reading achievement and opportunities for reducing inequity.

Language and self-regulation develop bidirectionally, and they synergistically affect most aspects of acquiring reading proficiency. Children and youth from historically marginalized communities tend to have less expansive knowledge of academic vocabulary and dialect common to instruction and academic text (i.e., General American English), and limited self-regulation skills relevant to reading, compared to less-marginalized peers. In this article, we argue that language and self-regulation are factors in demographic-related reading opportunity gaps, and that in addition to improving students' access to high-quality explicit phonics instruction, understanding their interactive relationship offers opportunities for schools to reduce disparities in reading outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The Effectiveness of Phonics Instruction Applying Korean Phoneme on English Word Reading Ability in Elementary School Students

The purpose of this study is to verify the effectiveness of phonics instruction applying Korean phoneme in English phoneme and monosyllabic word reading. To achieve this, an experiment was conducted in nine lessons over a period of three weeks. Participants were 22 Korean-speaking participants aged 9-10 years. The experiment group of 11 participants learned phonics by comparing sounds of English phonemes and Korean phonemes. The control group of 11 participants learned phonics using only English phonemes only. The effectiveness of the two teaching methods on English phonemes and monosyllabic word reading was found to be as follows. First, the result of phoneme reading test in the experimental group was found to be higher than that in the control group. Second, in the case of monosyllabic word reading test, both groups showed improvement of test results, although such improvement was not statistically significant. Participants in the experimental group attempted to read by combining each phoneme in the second test. However, participants in the control group did not try to combine each phoneme. This finding supports the view of applying of learners’ native language in learning and teaching phonics.

Early Reading Outcomes in Response to a Comprehensive Reading Curriculum for Students With Autism Spectrum Disorder and Intellectual Disability

This study examined the response of two students in the Southwestern United States with autism spectrum disorder and IQ in the intellectual disability range to a comprehensive, text-based reading intervention. The intervention, Friends on the Block, includes multiple strands of literacy providing explicit instruction in phonics, phonemic awareness, high-frequency irregular or temporarily irregular words, decoding, vocabulary, oral language, and comprehension. Multiple supports for students with intensive needs are embedded within the intervention, such as specially designed multi-criteria books, extensive scaffolding, and intensive cumulative review. Teachers customize the program to address the varying needs of students. We used single-case multiple baselines across levels of instruction design to assess growth on a measure of reading (words read correctly). Results indicated a positive, functional relation between reading intervention and word reading. Both students also demonstrated modest growth on measures of phonemic awareness, letter–sound knowledge, and word identification from pre- to post-intervention.

Multisensory Interactive Digital Text for English Phonics Instruction with Bilingual Beginning Readers

We investigated a technology-based tool for teaching English letter-sound correspondences with bilingual children learning phonologically and typologically distant languages: English and Chinese. We expect that learning about print at the phoneme level may be particularly challenging, given children’s experience with the morphosyllabic language of Chinese. This randomized-controlled study with 90 kindergarteners examined the effects of an iPad-based supplementary reading program compared with a control condition. The See Word Reading® program utilized picture-embedded cues for teaching phonics within lessons directed at the letter, word, and text levels. Measures of decoding, word reading, and spelling were taken at the pretest, posttest, and follow-up for both groups. Results showed better gains in word reading for the reading group, indicating the positive impact of this supplementary reading tool. Further, data collected online from the app showed that different types of letter-sound pairings were more challenging to learn, including pairings that are inconsistent and with phonemes that are specific to English.

Integrating reading strategy and phonics instruction to enhance foreign language reading comprehension: A complex approach to a complex phenomenon

This article argues that the skillful integration of reading strategy instruction with phonics instruction is highly useful for the enhancement of foreign language reading comprehension. There is a vast amount of evidence which clearly suggests that reading strategy instruction improves learners’ ability to understand foreign language texts. However, some researchers have argued that foreign language learners need a critical amount of lexical and grammatical knowledge to make use of reading strategy instruction; in other words, lower proficiency readers are unable to profit from reading strategy instruction. Yet, a detailed analysis of relevant published and unpublished research indicates that while more proficient readers are able to take full advantage of reading strategy instruction on its own, less skilled readers require an integrated phonics component in order to fully benefit from reading strategy instruction. This conclusion is in line with our current understanding of the complex process of reading which suggests that reading proficiency is the product of linguistic knowledge and strategic behaviour.