The purpose of this study is to explore how junior high school students develop visual recognition of the Alphabet. The participants were first-year students at a public junior high school in Japan. An uppercase letter was presented in 500 milliseconds, and then its lowercase letter and a distracter letter were presented on the screen. They were told to press an arrow-key pointing to the matching lowercase letter as accurately and as quickly as possible. Their reaction times were recorded almost every three months (April, July, October, and February). The Alphabet was divided into five groups according to the first reaction times measured in April: Slowest, Second slowest, Third slowest, Fourth slowest, and Fastest. An analysis of variance was administered to detect the differences among the five reaction times. The reaction time of the letter "D" was much slower than the others and was excluded from the analysis. The results showed that the slowest group was slower than the other four groups throughout the experiment. As a pedagogical implication, it is suggested that classroom teachers have to pay more attention to Alphabet recognition by focusing on the differences between uppercase and lowercase letters when they introduce the Alphabet to EFL students with a background in different writing systems.
