A Case Study On The Effect Of Phonics Readers On Fourth-graders' English Reading Decoding Ability

As a component of English reading literacy,English reading decoding ability is the ability to retrieve and understand the information contained in the appearance,text,phonemes and pictures of the book,including text concept,phonemic awareness,phonics and reading fluency.It is the foundation of reading,being especially important to beginning readers.In recent years,phonics instruction has been widely used in China to teach beginners learning to read since it can develop their phonemic awareness and help them use letter-sound correspondences to decode written words.Phonics readers can be adopted as reading exercises during the instruction,providing opportunities for beginning readers to apply phonics rules in reading and internalizing the phonics knowledge into skills.The present study attempts to investigate the effects of phonics readers on fourth graders' English reading decoding ability by conducting phonics readers instruction and decoding ability assessment,aiming to answer the following research questions:1)What are the effects of phonics readers on the fourth graders' English reading decoding ability?2)Will students of different levels and genders differ in the performance of English reading decoding ability?The study adopts a case study design which lasts for eight weeks.Participants are six fourth graders from a primary school in Qingcheng District of Qingyuan City,Guangdong.A pretest was conducted for the six participants.Then seven sessions of phonics reader reading instruction was implemented for the whole class.An individual English reading decoding ability test for the six participants two or three days after each instruction was administered to keep tack of the development of their English reading decoding ability.The results show that:(1)Phonics readers can develop students' text concept,phonemic awareness,phonics and fluency,hence improve their decoding ability.However,the improvement of reading fluency is relatively slow.(2)Participants' English proficiency is positively correlated to their English reading decoding abilityexcept for text concept and girls perform better in phonemic awareness,phonics ability and reading prosody than the boys from the same level.In the light of the results,we conclude that phonics readers have positive impact on fourth graders' decoding ability from all the dimensions including text concept,phonemic awareness,phonics and reading fluency.Some suggestions are put forward:(1)Select suitable phonics readers for the enlightenment teaching of English reading to improve beginning readers' English reading decoding ability as well as English reading literacy.(2)Integrate the instruction of phonemic awareness,phonics and reading.Pay attention to reading fluency and guide students to group words into phrases and to use proper expressions.(3)Take young learners' individual differences into concern,assess their ability before instruction and cater to students' individual needs.