Abstract
This study examined the effect of teaching synthetic phonics to schoolchildren for a year in the real classroom situation of Japanese elementary school. Participants were 205 Japanese schoolchildren ranging from 2nd to 6th grade. They were given 35 short lessons of synthetic phonics, and were taken two kinds of test three times a year: non-word repetition test and decoding test. As a result, the score of non-word repetition test got significantly higher from time to time. On the other hand, their decoding scores didn’t improve from time 1 (April) to time 2 (July). Therefore, teachers started to take more time for “blending activity” from September, in order to help children to read words, combining sounds they had already learned. Then, the decoding scores came to be significantly higher at time 3 (February). Some limitations and the outlook for the future research were discussed at the end of this paper.
