The effectiveness of a school-based phonics instructional material

Abstract

The updated version of the national English curriculum for compulsory education was released in 2022. In this updated version, phonics was also required. Although studies about phonics were uprising again after the release of the new curriculum, most of the previous studies did not specify phonics instruction approach or obtain a larger sample size. Besides, previous studies called for a school-based phonics instructional material to enhance English as a foreign language (EFL) beginners’ word recognition ability at word level. To bridge the gap, the researchers compiled a phonics instructional material based on synthetic phonics approach in light of the new national English curriculum and bottom-up reading model. To evaluate the effectiveness of such a phonics material, a number of 366 EFL students from three strata across two schools participated in this quasi-experiment via stratified random sampling technique. They experienced a pre-test, 16 weeks of training via the phonics material, a post-test as well as a delayed retention test, which was held three months later. The results of both independent t-test and paired samples t-test have indicated that the newly compiled phonics material can improve EFL students’ word recognition ability up to 50% and that the knowledge was well-retained after a period of time as practices went on. The results have further implied that to better implement phonics instruction and to radically improve EFL students’ reading ability, the solution might be to assign time in the extra-curriculum service to teach phonics via explicit and systematic synthetic phonics instruction tailored according to the school-based phonics material.