Phoneme -Grapheme decoding in Phonics-Based Instruction of English as a Second Language at an Italian High School: A Randomised Controlled Trial

Abstract

Recent neurological breakthroughs in our understanding of the Critical Period Hypothesis and prosody may suggest strategies on how phonics instruction could improve L2 language learning and in particular phoneme/grapheme decoding. We therefore conducted a randomised controlled-trial on the application of prosody and phonics techniques, to improve phoneme-grapheme decoding, to test these findings on a typical late high school cohort of Italians. A trial group of 24, 17-18 year-olds followed a short 10-week, 20-hour trial course and were compared to a control (14 students) preparing for the Cambridge First Certificate exam. The trial group were given phoneme/grapheme decoding material and event-related-potential reinforcement in substitution of traditional exam practice, taught from a current textbook and web-site material. Results showed that the trial-group significantly improved in both orthography (p=0.048) and pronunciation (p=0.000), in particular in the long vowel and digraph categories. Furthermore, they significantly improved in a shortened interview category (p=0.024), for lexis, discourse and pronunciation. Due to the trial’s small size, we concentrated on reducing type 2 statistical errors to a minimum. We believe that our results confirmed the neurological findings of the use of prosody in TESOL and confirmed the validity of phonics techniques for L2 teaching. We also consider that the results are sufficiently robust to warrant a full-sized trial of phonics and prosody as a valid TESOL teaching technique

Efficacy of English Phonics Instruction in Helping EFL Students to Decode Vowel Digraph Letters

“…In addition, phonics instruction also improves reading comprehension so students more efficiently understand information and access knowledge. In general, phonics helps students improve their literacy skills to spend time effectively accessing reading material (Martínez, 2011). In the reading aspect, reading aloud has a close relationship with phonics aspects, where phonics will help students to be able to read well (Ehri, 2022).…”

Explicit and Differentiated Phonics Instruction on Pupils’ Literacy Skills in Gambian Lower Basic Schools

“…The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [26] investigated the effects of explicit phonics instruction on the achievement of native and non-native speakers of English in literacy skills and reported that the instruction had a significant effect on the native speakers' achievement in reading and writing than nonexplicit phonics instruction. Similarly, Martinez [17] found that explicit phonics instruction significantly improved EFL children's reading comprehension. The findings of the study revealed that explicit phonics instruction improved EFL students' comprehension, pronunciation, and understanding of what was being read.…”

“…According to Armbruster et al [15], explicit phonics instruction is the direct teaching of the connection between graphemes and phonemes. Phonics instruction has been reported to be effective at improving proficiency in literacy skills and reading comprehension among pupils in elementary school [16,17];. Other studies have investigated the influence of parental involvement on the development of literacy skills in young readers [6].…”

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“…The teaching of English pronunciation appears to be not only still heavily informed by notions of 'standardness' and 'nativespeakerism' (Grazzi 2014;Newbold 2017), with no consideration, in fact, of the findings provided by ELF research, but even largely ignored (Kelly 2000) or marginalised (Levis 2005), especially at education levels lower than university (e.g. Szpyra-Kozłowska, 2008;Coates et al 2017;Kralova, Kucerka 2019). Several studies 8 have shown that one of the problems related to the lack of interest in pronunciation development is that non-native EFL teachers often have a very low phonetic competence, which leads them to neglect both pronunciation instruction per se and the correction of their learners' errors in this area, with obvious repercussions on the development of the learner's own pronunciation skill (Petsy 2022).…”