Teaching L2 Phoneme or Rime Awareness to L2 Readers

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

A short-term longitudinal study examined the effect of synthetic (phoneme-based) versus analytic (rime-based) phonics on L2 phonological awareness and L2 word reading. Forty-three Korean-speaking EFL children in third grade were randomly assigned to phoneme-based or rime-based group. The two groups had equal English phonological awareness and word reading skills. Twelve 40-minute teaching sessions over three months were provided to each group. After treatments, L2 phonological awareness (phoneme and rime) and L2 word reading with two conditions (unfamiliar real words and pseudo words) were measured. The findings of the two experimental tasks showed that children explicitly taught to read out words with phoneme-based reading strategy performed better on L2 phonological awareness and L2 word reading than those with rime-based reading strategy. Furthermore, L2 phoneme awareness across the two groups was largely associated with L2 word reading. More specifically, L2 nucleus (medial vowel or vowel cluster) and coda (final consonant or consonant cluster) awareness were stronger predictors of L2 word reading than L2 rime awareness. The results suggest that a letter recoding strategy based on L2 phoneme may play a crucial role in, at least, the early stages of learning to read in an L2.