| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立彰化師範大學 === 英語學系 === 98 === Abstract
The purpose of the present study was to investigate and compare the effectiveness of two phonics approaches, the word box integrated with the word sorting approach and the traditional phonics approach, on Taiwanese junior high school EFL poor spellers’ vowel spelling ability. The subjects were 42 junior high school second-year students from Talin Junior High School in Chiai County, who were chosen based on the researcher’s self-designed nonword screening spelling test.
The nonwords in the test were modified according to Bear et. al’s 2008 real words in Primary Spelling Inventory. The 42 subjects were randomly assigned either to the word box integrated with the word sorting group or to the traditional phonics group.
The instruments implemented in the study included a nonword spelling pretest and a nonword spelling posttest. The nonwords used in the pretest and the posttest were based on the Test of Word Reading Efficiency (TOWRE). The subjects were given a pretest before the instruction. Concerning the instructional phase, each class session comprised of 15-minutes of phonics instruction per class, for a total of 30 class sessions. The subjects were provided 6-10 words containing the vowel target features in each class session. After the instruction, a posttest was administered to the subjects to check the effectiveness of the two phonics approaches.
The results showed that both the word box integrated with the word sorting group and the traditional phonics group significantly improved their performance in spelling short and long vowel patterns in the post instructional phase. Moreover, the word box integrated with the word sorting group outperformed the traditional phonics group in the posttest. In terms of the different vowel patterns of the posttest, the subjects in the word box integrated with the word sorting group performed significantly better than those in the traditional phonics group in spelling short a, short i, short o, short u, long a, long e, and long o patterns. Furthermore, the word box integrated with the word sorting group was found to make fewer spelling errors in the posttest than the traditional phonics group. As for the short vowel spelling errors, both groups had difficulty in spelling short e patterns. Regarding the long vowel spelling errors, long i patterns were difficult for both groups. The results accord with previous studies showing Taiwanese junior high school students had difficulty spelling short e and long i patterns. Finally, pedagogical implications and suggestions for future studies were provided.
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