Examining the Effectiveness of Synthetic Phonics Instruction in Foreign Language Activities at a Public Elementary School

Abstract

This study examined whether synthetic phonics instruction promotes middle-grade elementary school students' ability to recognize phonemes and to phonetize letters. Two research questions were set. (1) Does teaching synthetic phonics increase the ability to recognize phonemes? (2) Does teaching synthetic phonics promote the ability to phonetize letters? Synthetic phonics instruction of 42 phonemes (using Jolly Phonics as the teaching material) was given to 35 third-graders and 42 fourth-graders at a Japanese elementary school during the first 10 minutes of 45-minute language class for one year. A phoneme listening test and a decoding test were conducted to verify the effectiveness of the instruction. The results showed that (1) some phonemes were difficult to learn and others were relatively easy to learn, (2) students were able to acquire digraph phonemes through instruction, and (3) their ability to phonetize letters was improved from October to March, indicating that synthetic phonics instruction is effective and may lead to higher grades.