Since 2010, the 2007 revised curriculum was adopted to elementary school English. In the 2007 revised curriculum, students started to learn written language one semester earlier than the 2007 curriculum. This change was implemented to make up for the...
Since 2010, the 2007 revised curriculum was adopted to elementary school English. In the 2007 revised curriculum, students started to learn written language one semester earlier than the 2007 curriculum. This change was implemented to make up for the inefficiencies of the sixth and seventh curriculums, which focused on spoken language. Although the current curriculum states that the role of written language is limited to the understanding of spoken language, it is clear that teaching both reading and writing will also be reinforced. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct field research on the written language portion of the new curriculum.
The purpose of this study is to explore the proper phonics approach in Korean elementary schools and to investigate how teaching phonics affects students' phonemic awareness, reading ability, as well as students' attitudes toward the instruction of phonics. To attain the forementioned objectives, the following research questions were proposed:
1) How does teaching phonics affect students' phonemic awareness?
2) How does teaching phonics affect students' reading comprehension of beginner-level text?
3) What attitudes do students have toward phonics teaching?
To find the answers to the research questions, this study utilized research, where the teacher, acting as the main agent of the research, planned, implemented, and analyzed the results of public, elementary school students. This study was conducted with twenty-seven sixth graders. After implementing 34 phonics teaching sessions, the improvements of students' phonics knowledge, phonemic awareness, text comprehension, and attitudes toward written language were analyzed through the preliminary and post inspection tests, and their journals. Students' phonics knowledge, phonemic awareness, and text comprehension were analyzed with an independent sample t-test. The analysis of their attitudes was conducted using both quantitative and qualitative research methods; the independent sample t-test was done using the quantitative research method, while analyzing students' journals was done using the qualitative research method.
This study tried to overcome the drawbacks of the traditional approach to teach phonics. Therefore, three principles were set and adopted in preparing the phonics lessons. First, phonics classes were done in a meaningful context. At the beginning of class, the teacher provided a simple and meaningful story to the students. The story was utilized as the introduction to the main contents of the class; the grapheme-phoneme relationship. Second, teaching phonics had to be explicit and systematic. Korean EFL learners, in classes that used implicit phonics methods, often misunderstood or spent too much time trying to understand the contents of the lesson. Third, various activities and games were used to satisfy young learners' interests.
After phonics classes, students' showed positive changes on the three research questions of the study. Their decoding ability, phonemic awareness, and text comprehension improved. The researcher did further analysis of the data. Students were divided into three groups according to their preliminary test results. Despite the differences among the groups, they all showed improvement in the three research areas. However, the score of the lowest group indicated the most improvement. The researcher examined the changes in students' scores in the five categories of phonemic awareness; rhyme, oddity tasks, oral blending, oral segmentation and phonemic manipulation. According to the statistics, students improved in all the categories, but the reliability of each category varied.
The quantitative and qualitative methods were used for the analysis of students' attitudes. The Likert scale, as a quantitative method, was applied to the preliminary and post surveys of students. The surveys were analyzed with the independent sample t-test. According to the survey results, teaching phonics increased students' desire to read the English, written language, have more confidence, and have more interest in reading. From students' journal entries, four interesting responses were observed. First, students recognized that they gained new knowledge from the phonics classes. Second, students analyzed the grapheme-phoneme relationship of the unknown words in their own ways. Third, throughout the phonics curriculum, students had the expectation, confidence, interest, and will to read. Lastly, lower level learners had trouble and expressed little interest when they learned the complex relationship between the grapheme and the phoneme.
Based on the results of the study, there were some positive implications:
First and foremost, teaching phonics in a public, elementary school, English class should be systematic and explicit. Second, phonics class should be composed of various activities with context. Third, the phonics approach mentioned throughout this study can help decrease the number of struggling English learners.
This study, however, has a few limitations:
First, due to the lack of connecting vocabulary and stories of this study with the school textbook, it could be hard to apply the contents of the study directly to reading classes. Instead, teachers can benefit from referring to the methods and the procedures of this approach to teaching phonics. Second, due to the large number of students that participated in this study, the teacher cannot sufficiently analyze the effective domain of students in-depth.
Based on these conclusions, the following correlation and suggestion were made for follow-up studies:
The lower the students' level, the more they improved through the phonics lessons. Therefore, we can see that struggling English learners were affected dramatically by teaching phonics. But there are two reasons which hinder the clarification of the forementioned prediction; this study did not focus on lower level studen