The effectiveness of synthetic phonics in the development of early reading skills among struggling young ESL readers

Abstract

A quasi-experimental research design was used to investigate the effectiveness of synthetic phonics in the development of early reading skills among struggling young English as a second language (ESL) readers in a rural school. The pretest and posttest, adapted from the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening (PALS) for Preschool Students and Grades 1 to 3 tests, assessed children's early reading skills. A semi-structured interview was used to gather information. The findings indicated that the performance of students in the experimental group in decoding was significantly higher in the posttest, where t(39) = 31.441, p < .00005. Likewise, in comprehension, the experimental group achieved significantly higher scores in the posttest, where t(39) = 15.322, p < .00005. There was a significant difference in the achievement between the two groups, where t(78) = 31.010, p < .00005. This indicates that synthetic phonics could be effective in developing early reading skills for struggling readers. ARTICLE HISTORY

The Effect of a Suggested Multisensory Phonics Program on Developing Kindergarten Pre-service Teachers' EFL Reading Accuracy and Phonemic Awareness

“…The use of magnetic letters or letter cards to blend spoken words together is quite common in synthetic phonics programs. Research supports the argument that synthetic phonics interventions can have a significant impact on EFL reading accuracy and phonemic awareness ( Campbell et al, 2014;Jamaludin et al, 2015;Phipps, 2011;Rupley, 2009;Stuart, 1999).…”

“…The teaching of phonics has become one of the most important areas in literacy development (Jamaludin et al, 2015;Rupley, 2009). There are many approaches to teaching phonics including explicit, synthetic, analytic and embedded ways.…”

“…Educators can explicitly teach phonics through play based meaningful experiences by linking phoneme-grapheme instruction directly to picture books, during shared reading, through rhymes and dramatic play (Casalis & Cole, 2009;Escudero, 2014;Jamaludin et al, 2015;McCarthy, 2008;Mena & Chapetón, 2014;Perez, 2010;Phipps, 2011;Plaza, 2001). Phonics instruction uses stories and actions to support the learning of the letter sounds.…”

“…Phonics instruction uses stories and actions to support the learning of the letter sounds. Such materials add much fun and also make remembering the sounds easier for the learners (Campbell et al, 2014;Jamaludin et al, 2015;Phipps, 2011).…”

“…They must be able to identify, discriminate similar looking letters, and name each letter in the alphabet in order to make meaningful associations between letter symbols and their corresponding sound representations (Carson et al, 2015;Jamaludin et al, 2015;Pinto et al, 2015). Knowledge of the alphabetic principle refers to a realization that, in alphabetic orthographies, spoken words are comprised of phonemes and the phonemes are represented in text as letters (August et al, 2009;Gunning, 2009).…”