Developing Fourth Graders'''' Word Recognition and Spelling Abilities in English

• Main Authors: Jean Chang, 章菁
• Other Authors: Chien-ju Chang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2003
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/54408289240558001766

碩士 === 國立台北師範學院 === 兒童英語教育研究所 === 91 === ABSTRACT The present study aims at exploring fourth-graders’ word recognition and spelling abilities in English. It is designed to examine the effects of phonics instruction and reading-writing instruction on EFL students’ letter identification, word recognition, word spelling, experimental word recognition, and experimental word spelling performance. Sixty fourth-grade EFL students from nine fourth-grade classes at an elementary school in Taipei City were selected to participate in this study. The subjects were divided into two groups: the phonics group and the reading-writing group, with thirty students in each group providing that there were no significant differences in their English ability. In each group, students were further categorized into high-level and low-level subgroups according to their performance in the pretest. The experiments of the respective conditions lasted for sixty-four 30-minute class periods over a sixteen-week period of time. The results are as follows: Systematic phonics instruction appears to have merits on performance of letter identification, word recognition, word spelling, experimental word recognition, and experimental word spelling over reading-writing instruction. As for the subgroup performance, the phonics low-level subgroup performed better significantly than did the reading-writing low-level subgroup on both experimental word recognition and experimental word spelling measures whereas the phonics high-level subgroup performed better significantly than did the reading-writing high-level subgroup only on the measure of experimental word recognition. No significant differences were found between the phonics high-level subgroup and the reading-writing high-level subgroup.