A Longitudinal Study of Phonological Ability of Junior High School Students in an English-Language Immersion Program in Japan

Abstract

The main purpose of this study was to demonstrate the effects of an English-language immersion program in Japan on the development of the students’ phonological ability, and evaluate whether such an ability improves after a year-long participation in the program. A total of 63 junior high school students who had taken an early immersion program for seven years in Japan were enrolled in this study. The students took Gathercole and Baddeley’s (1996) Children’s Test of Nonword Repetition and were asked to repeat 40 nonwords. The stimuli were composed of 10 two-syllable, 10 three-syllable, 10 four-syllable, and 10 five-syllable nonwords. The average score of the group was 20.98 (52.45%), significantly higher than that of 27 Japanese university students who had studied English for at least six years in Japan but who had never taken an immersion program. Additionally, in the present study, the number of syllables in nonwords was found to affect the students’ repetition performances; the more syllables, the more difficult. Furthermore, 24 immersion students took the same test twice when they were 7th and 8th graders. Contrary to our prediction, their scores did not change during the 12 months. The results of the study indicate a difference in the development of phonological ability between English-speaking children and learners in an immersion program in Japan, where only limited access to English is available in their daily lives.