Page 16 - ELG2205 May Issue 480

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TRENDING IN READING

Sounds like a good idea, but
Sounds like a good idea, but

what’s the evidence?
what’ s the evidence?

Gill Ragsdale gathers answers from 30 years of phonics research

se of phonics can improve learning
to read English as a second language,
according to a review of 30 years’ PHOTO BY PIXABAY
Uresearch by Dennis Odo, of Pusan
National University, South Korea.
Odo conducted a comprehensive statistical
analysis (a meta-analysis) pooling the overall
results of 46 studies from 1990 to 2019 looking
at the effect of using phonological awareness
and phonics on learners’ reading skills.
Phonics, the system of linking spoken sounds
to one or more written letters to help learners
decode and learn new words, is a common
strategy with young learners in the primary
English L1 classroom, but less commonly used
with L2 learners. Even in the L1 classroom,
however, phonics remains controversial,
especially as phonics does not map as reliably
onto English letter clusters as they do when
applied to more orderly languages, such as
Spanish or German. In the L2 classroom,
phonics is often considered to over-complicate
the learning process.
While phonics is the applied system, it’s effect size. However, understanding these to those whose languages were alphabetic, or
underpinned by the skill of phonological moderating influences, ie, what makes the logographic, ie, Chinese.)
awareness, ie, the ability to recognise and teaching of phonics more or less effective, is With regard to the stage of education,
identify spoken sounds. This is a skill that valuable in itself. while the use of phonics with primary and
can be harnessed to support reading without At first glance, the larger effect when using elementary students showed moderate effects
referring to the system of phonics. researcher-designed assessment may suggest (g=0.43-0.56), the effect at middle school was
Debate has been heated (even called researcher bias but it’s just as likely to reflect very much larger (g=1.72).
‘Reading Wars’) as to whether phonics is the nature of standardised assessments. If A quality meta-analysis such as Odo’s is no
helpful or harmful when teaching reading, using phonics really does improve reading small job, but all that hard work ultimately
the alternative being teaching whole words. and this can be reliably measured, why is rests on the quality of the studies included. I
Nevertheless, in recent years, phonics has it not being measured using standardised have yet to read any such analysis that does
become the mainstay of early years education assessments? not lament on this issue, and that the disparity
in English primary schools, and thought to When using phonics, strategies ranged between studies is like comparing apples, some
be especially useful with weaker readers and from combining phonological awareness and of which are rotten, to oranges.
those whose native language is not English – phonics (g= -0.03 – so basically no effect Overall, then, is this a final verdict on the use
suggesting untapped potential for EFL/ESL at all), to those relying on phonological of phonics? Since this is a statistical analysis, we
tuition. awareness alone (g=0.46 – moderate) and are helpfully suppled with confidence intervals
Seeming to support this, Odo’s meta- to those focusing on phonics (g=0.76 – around the effect size to help us make up our
analysis found a significant, moderate effect borderline large effect) suggesting using the minds. In this case, the overall moderate effect
of phonics instruction on improving reading phonics system, rather than just phonological size of g=0.53 has a confidence interval of 0.27-
skills (Hedge’s g=0.53) overall. However, awareness is instrumental in supporting 0.79. This means that we can be 95% confident
the effect size varied considerably across the reading skills. that the true effect size is somewhere in that
included studies. Some of this variability could The learning context was also a factor range. That is, between small and large.
be accounted for by differences in study design, with greater effects in the EFL compared to It seems that, further, more robustly designed
the way phonics was taught, how long phonics the ESL classroom (g=0.26, a small effect studies are needed to truly resolve this issue
instruction was used, the first language of the vs g=0.83, a large effect). Odo suggests that with more confidence – but this meta-analysis
learners and the education stage. this may be due to EFL teachers spending and the influencing factors described will be an
Strong experimental designs with a more time on practising decoding activities, excellent resource for future research.
comparison control group tended to have such as decoding pseudo-words, while ESL
lower effect sizes, as did those studies using teachers are necessarily more focused on real RESEARCH
standardised assessments, as opposed to those content vocabulary. (There was also some n Odo, D M (2021), ‘A meta-analysis of the
prepared by the researcher. The differences evidence that the L1 writing system was a effect of phonological awareness and/or
in effects sizes due to study design were factor: phonics had a larger impact on learners phonics instruction on word and pseudo word
substantial: 0.26-0.33 vs 0.71-1.68. This whose first languages were alphasyllabaries reading of English as an L2’, SAGE Open. doi:
doesn’t promote confidence in the overall (abugidas), eg, Amharic or Hindi, compared 10.1177 /21582440211059168.
16 May 2022