Teaching Phonics through Awareness-Raising Activities

Paul Sze The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Paper presented at the 4th CamTESOL Conference on English Language

Teaching “Building Bridges to the World”, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 23-24 February 2008

Phonics is a method of teaching children to read. In English-speaking countries, it is commonly used in teaching beginning reading in the mother tongue (L1) (Eldredge, 2004; Campbell, 2004). Children are taught to recognize the relationship between letters and sounds. They are taught the sounds which the letters of the alphabet represent, and then try to build up the sound of a new or unfamiliar word by saying it one sound at a time (Richards, Platt, & Platt, 1992, p. 274). In the elementary grades in these countries, phonics is taught as a means; the end is that young children will gradually begin to read books on their own. Phonics is not a core topic in the second language (L2) teaching methodology. It has no place in the major methodology texts. There has been very little research on the effect of phonics instruction on L2 children’s language development. Indeed, where phonics is advocated in L2 teaching contexts, it is usually for teaching immigrant adult ESL (English as a Second Language) learners to read (Davidson & Strucker, 2002; Holt, 1995; Jones, 1996). Yet, for a variety of reasons, phonics has become a major component of the English Language curriculum at the majority of primary schools in Hong Kong. In the last couple of years, this enthusiasm for phonics has been picked up by some secondary schools, which have begun to teach phonics to their lower secondary students. The key question I will address in this paper is how we should approach phonics teaching in L2 contexts. My main purpose in this paper is to argue for an awareness raising approach to teaching phonics to school children who learn English as a second language. In the first part of the paper, I will outline the teaching of phonics in L2 contexts, using the Hong Kong Primary English curriculum as an example. I will point to the limitations of the current approach, which is borrowed from phonics teaching in L1 contexts. In the second part of the paper, I propose an awareness raising approach to teaching phonics to ESL learners in schools. I will provide a rationale for this approach and finish with three example awareness raising activities

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for school children.

Phonics for L2 Learners: Problems and Prospects Phonological awareness is one of the strongest predictors of success in learning to read. Recent research findings indicate that the development of proficiency in the first language (L1) reading structures may significantly influence reading acquisition in a second language (L2). In Hong Kong, the majority of students are Chinese, whose first language is logographic. Apparently, phonological awareness does not play a part in HK children's learning to read Chinese. Although phonics is taught to lower primary children, it is not primarily for teaching beginning reading. Given the situation, can phonics, or phonological awareness activities, facilitate our students' learning of pronunciation and spelling? Phonics in the Hong Kong English Curriculum for Primary and Secondary Schools To date, the only official English Language curriculum document in Hong Kong that has included phonics is the English Language Curriculum for Primary One to Six, published by the Curriculum Development Council in 2004 (hereafter the Curriculum Guide). In the Curriculum Guide, phonics is included as a core linguistic component along with grammar, vocabulary, the four skills, etc. Phonics is promoted for a range of benefits for young learners, including correct pronunciation, the ability to sound out new words, competence in reading aloud and hence increased interest in reading books in English, ability to discriminate between speech sounds, enhanced reading ability, better spelling, and general listening and speaking improvement (pp. 166-171). The primary goal of phonics instruction is that young learners will be able to work out the pronunciation of a word from its spelling, and the spelling of a word from its pronunciation (p. 174). The Curriculum Guide stipulates that phonics learning and teaching should commence at Primary One. Programme content and design In terms of what is to be taught in a phonics programme, according to the Curriculum Guide, a unit of teaching is a letter sound. There are two main groups of letter sounds: consonants and vowels. Consonant letter sounds are made up of either a single letter, two letters occurring together to produce a consonant cluster (called “blends’), or two

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letters combining to produce one consonant sound (called “diagraphs”). Vowel letter sounds include short vowels and long vowels. The selection and sequence of letter sounds should be school-based, with reference to the learning resources used in the school and the learners’ needs. However, the Curriculum Guide suggests that both consonant and vowel letter sounds need to be covered in a school “so that opportunities are provided for learners to practise the skills of blending and chunking letters and syllables and of working out the pronunciation and spelling of a whole word” (p. 174) With regard to the design of the phonics programme, the Curriculum Guide advises against a separate phonics syllabus. Schools should incorporate phonics learning into the school main English programme. “It is not recommended that some regular English lessons be assigned to the learning and teaching of phonics” (p. 172). According to the Curriculum Guide, phonics can be taught and practiced in the school’s General English Programme as well as Reading Workshops. Methodology for phonics instruction How, then, should phonics be taught in class lessons? “Learners need to be helped to develop an awareness of the letter-sound relationships in English words through explicit teaching at any early stage of learning” (Curriculum Development Council, p. 172; emphasis added). In other words, learners should be guided to learn to specific sounds that each letter or letter combination represents. The Curriculum Guide also emphasizes phonics learning and teaching in context. so that young learners will “retain what they have learnt and transfer the knowledge and skills in new situation” (p. 172). But what does contextualized phonics learning and teaching mean? The Curriculum Guide offers the following example. When the teacher takes through students through a big book story in a shared reading lesson, she can guide them to apply their previous phonics knowledge and skills to sound out similar but new words in the story text. They can also learn one or two new letter sounds that appear frequently in the story text. The Curriculum Guide contends that this training will enable students to transfer the phonic rule in question when they read other texts. Reading materials in the General English programme can be exploited in a similar fashion.

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It may be inferred from the example that contextualization here means that phonics instruction should be integrated with other activities in the main English Language programme of each school. It should not be compartmentalized and approach as a separate component. As for the main learning activity, the Curriculum Guide suggests having learners match either whole-words or pictures (given visually on letter cards or word cards, or on the board) with the target letter-sound. This main learning activity can be complemented by other short and interesting games and activities such as phonics board games, tongue twisters, and word mazes. Limitations of phonics instruction in L2 contexts. 1. There is not an established knowledge base for teaching phonics in L2 contexts. 2. Phonics instruction needs words for drawing generalisations. Lower primary L1 children already have quite a large listening-speaking vocabulary. This is not the case with lower primary L2 children. 3. Phonics instructions involves pronunciation discrimination. Lower primary L1 children have more or less mastered the sound system of their mother tongue. Lower primary L2 children are still struggling with the sounds of the L2. 4. In Hong Kong, primary children do not start to read English story books independently until quite late. The learning of phonics does not offer them immediate gratification. 5. This point has not been researched thoroughly, but Chinese writing is logographic. Chinese children may (to a certain extent) learn English words through visual recognition, rather than through phonetic analysis. 6. So far, phonics instruction in Hong Kong has been entrusted with too many objectives: pronunciation, vocabulary, spelling, etc. The purpose of a phonics programme is often unclear. Sometimes, the phonics programme is trying to achieve too many things. Ironically, the primary purpose of phonics, which is facilitating beginning reading, is forgotten in the process. In fact, the Curriculum Guide for Primary English in Hong Kong admits the limitations of phonics instruction and, probably contradicting its strong claims regarding the benefits of phonics teaching, concedes that “overemphasis on phonics skills may lead to confusion and frustration in learning and teaching English” (p. 171).

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Should phonics be taught, then? Although phonics is still not an established activity in L2 teaching, in my view, it is still worth exploring ways of helping learners deduce the pronunciation of a word, and spell out a word from its pronunciation. These are skills which will benefit L2 learners for life. But as there is not an established methodology for teaching phonics in L2 contexts, teachers need to innovate, and modify conventional L1 phonics methods, to suit the needs of their students. They also need to have clear goals for their phonics programme, and design their syllabus and methods accordingly. Care should be taken that phonics does not become another area of rote learning. If done well, phonics has the following potential advantages: At the moment, the methods for teaching phonics in L2 contexts are mainly borrowed from those for L1 phonics, and involve teaching learners the specific sound-spelling associations. In the second part of this paper, I will propose an awareness approach to teaching phonics to L2 learners.

Towards an Awareness Raising Approach to Phonics Instruction In the second part of the paper, I propose an awareness raising approach to teaching phonics to ESL learners in schools. I will provide a rationale for this approach and finish with three example awareness raising activities for school children. What is awareness raising? The concept comes from cognitivist learning theory, which argues that, as a prerequisite for the restructuring of the learner’s mental representation of the language, some degree of conscious awareness is necessary. In L2 teaching, awareness raising aims at helping learners uncover gaps in their knowledge (Thornbury, 2005, p. 41). These contrast with “presentation activities”, whereby the teacher presents the target knowledge to learners directly. In awareness activities, the teacher’s role is to guide the uncovering process and provide support and feedback where necessary. Awareness raising has been applied in pronunciation teaching (Kenworthy, 1987; Dalton & Seidlhofer, 1994; Laroy, 1995). Awareness-raising activities can be used to build awareness of specific aspects of English pronunciation (word stress, sentence stress, sounds, intonation, weak forms, etc.).

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Awareness raising: Awareness of what? This paper argues for an awareness raising approach to teaching phonics in L2 contexts. This approach aims to increase learners’ general sensitivity to sound-spelling correspondence. While it is obvious that the dimension of “spelling” in sound-spelling correspondence refers to letter combinations in words, the dimension of “sound” may not be that straightforward. What exactly is meant by awareness of “sound”? The term “phonological awareness” in sometimes used in the literature on language learning to refer to awareness of speech sound. Some writers prefer a more precise definition for “phonological awareness”. Ashmore, Farrier, Paulson, and Chu (2003), for example, explain “phonological awareness” as

a more compassing term referring to an awareness of larger spoken units such as syllables and rhyming words. Tasks such as tapping out the number of syllables in a word, rhyming words, telling the number of phonemes included in single words, identifying separate words in a spoken sentence, and deleting initial or final phonemes of a word demonstrate phonological awareness. (p. 34)

They use the term “phonemic awareness” to refer to the conscious ability to analyse spoken language into its component sounds (phonemes) and to perform mental operations on these smaller linguistic units. Heilman (2002) contend that children who have phonemic awareness is able to understand that:

- words have small sounds that can be pulled apart and put back together; - sounds in words have a specific order (first sound, middle sound, final sound); - sounds in words can be counted; - sounds in words can be moved, removed or replaced to make new words; - several sounds can be represented with many different letters. (p. 29)

In other words, phonological awareness has more to do with general auditory features of human languages, while phonemic awareness with basic sounds (phonemes) residing in individual syllables. Since phonics is concerned with specific sound-spelling matches in a language, it is phonemic awareness that has a more direct impact on the success of phonics instruction (Ashmore et al., 2003).

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Since this paper advocates heightening learners’ general sensitivity to sound-spelling correspondence, and not the instruction of particular matches between pronunciation and spelling, the kind of sound awareness I am adopting is closer to “phonological awareness”. Effect of phonological awareness training on L2 word learning To date, not only is there an absence of phonics teaching in the L2 teaching methodology literature, there is a similar absence of research on the effect on phonics instruction (except for a study by Yeung & Cheung, 2005, which compared a phonics group from Hong Kong and a Pinyin group from Guangzhou in their learning of a sight vocabulary in English). In other words, we do not know how best to teach phonics to L2 children; we do not even know the precise effect of phonics instruction. Nevertheless, a small number of studies have been carried out with Chinese children on the effect of phonological awareness training and word learning in English. Hu (2003)examined the role of phonological memory and phonological awareness in word learning in English. Measures of phonological memory and phonological awareness were administered to 58 Chinese-speaking 4-year-olds 4 times (T1 to T4) across 2 years. English word learning was assessed at T3, and children's ability to relearn the words was assessed at T4. Hu found that phonological memory was related to L2 word learning at T3, whereas phonological awareness was not. However, phonological awareness emerged as a significant predictor at T4, even after allowing for L2 word learning at T3 and phonological memory. From the results, Hu suggests that phonological memory and phonological awareness may support English word learning, but phonological awareness may play a specific role when the words are relearned. While Hu examined the relationship between phonological memory and phonological awareness on the one hand, and English word learning on the other, Ashmore, Farrier, Paulson, and Chu (2003) directly tested the effectiveness of phonemic awareness drills on phonological awareness and word reading performance in English of Mainland Chinese students in primary school. Over a period of 10 weeks, 101 grades 1 and 2 in the experimental group engaged in a range of phonemic awareness drills. Analyses showed an important and consistent difference in words learned by members of the experimental group. Ashmore et al. concluded strong support for explicit instruction in phonemic awareness for English word learning by Chinese primary schoolchildren.

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Holm and Dodd (1996) examined the relationship between first and second language literacy by identifying the skills and processes developed in the first language that were transferred to the second language. The performance of 40 university students from The People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Australia were compared on a series of tasks that assessed phonological awareness and reading and spelling skills in English. The results indicated that the Hong Kong students (with non-alphabetic first language literacy) had limited phonological awareness compared to those students with alphabetic first language literacy. The reading and spelling tasks showed no differences between the groups on processing of real words. However, the students from Hong Kong had difficulty processing nonwords because of their poor phonological awareness. The results supported the hypothesis that people learning English as a second language (ESL) transfer their literacy processing skills from their first language to English. When the phonological awareness required in English had not been developed in the first language, ESL students were limited to a whole-word, visual strategy. The findings indicate that students from non-alphabetic written language backgrounds might have difficulties with new, or unfamiliar words when attending universities where English is the medium of instruction. In summary, while there is little empirical support for the effectiveness of phonics instruction for word learning, the available research on Chinese-speaking learners provides strong support for phonological awareness training in helping Chinese ESL learners with word learning in English. Awareness raising activities for L2 phonics learning There are two kinds of awareness raising activities. The first refers to awareness building as the first step in a teaching sequence which concludes with rule deduction from language samples and followed by focused practice. Richards (1990) names this teaching sequence, in the context of teaching speaking, the direct approach, and contrasts it with an indirect approach, which simply gets learners to practise the target features of speaking through role-play and problem-solving tasks, without making explicit for them what they are practising. The second kind of awareness raising, which I am advocating here is for enhancing learners’ general sensitivity to sound-spelling correspondence. This differs from the conventional metalinguistic consciousness-raising approaches often advocated for grammar teaching (Sharwood Smith, 1988; Rutherford, 1987). The rationale is that once students are sensitive enough to sound-spelling correspondence generally, they will notice, look for, and

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deduce the specific relationships themselves. The emphasis here is on phonics as skill rather than as knowledge. Such awareness-raising activities are short (5-15 minutes) game-like activities which require learners to pay careful attention to the pronunciation and spelling of the words involved. They may, or may not, focus on particular letter-sound associations. These activities have the following advantages over direct teaching of particular sound-spelling associations:

They nurture independent learners: learners increase their sensitivity to sound-spelling correspondence so that on their own, they can (a) sound out a new word from its spelling, (b) spell a word from its pronunciation.

They are flexible in terms of classroom application: they are short and can be slotted into the teaching timetable easily.

They are flexible in terms of integration with the main English Language teaching programme.

They are cognitively more challenging because they invite learners to discover patterns and relationships on their own.

Examples of Awareness Raising Activities Below I offer three examples of awareness raising activities. The specific worksheets can be found in the appendices. Example 1 (Worksheet A) Learners, working in groups, are given a map of the Hong Kong Mass Transport system. They are also given some word cards which contain names of the stations on the ‘red line’. Their task is to label the names of the stations on the red line with the word cards. Some of the learners will have heard of the names of these stations in their mother-tongue, Cantonese. The task requires them to try sounding out the names of the stations from the spelling. Example 2 (Worksheet B) Learners, working individually or in groups, are given the worksheet which contains 14 names. Six of the names are boys’ names and six are girls’ names in English; the last two are Japanese names included as fun distractors.

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The names chosen are new to the learners. They try sounding out the names from the spelling, and decide whether each sounds like a boy’s name, or a girl’s name. They may get some of the answers wrong, but the purpose is to (a) encourage them to sound out words from their spelling, and (b) heighten their awareness of English pronunciations in general. Example 3 (Worksheet C) Learners are given the pictures of 6 new merchandise items, and 15 brandnames. Their task is to choose the best brandname for each merchandise item. This activity requires learners to, first, think of and pronounce the word for each merchandise item, and, second, sound out the 15 brandnames from the spelling. Conclusion In this paper, I have surveyed the teaching of phonics in L1 contexts. Using the Hong Kong Primary English curriculum as an example, I have pointed to the limitations of phonics instruction in L2 contexts. I have argued that, despite the limitations, the ability to sound out a new word from its spelling and to spell a word from its pronunciation, is a skill which will benefit ESL learners for life. I have contended that rather than directly teaching sound-spelling associations in English, a possible solution is to use an awareness raising approach to teaching phonics to ESL learners. I have explained and discussed the advantages of this approach, and provided three examples of awareness raising activities. I believe that this approach is worth exploring further, with respect to both materials design and research on its effectiveness.

References Ashmore, R. A., Farrier, M. J., Paulson, L. H., & Chu, X. (2003). The effects of

phonemic awareness drills on phonologcial awareness and word reading performacne in a later learned alphabetic script. Reading improvment, 40(1), 33-47.

Campbell, R. (2004). Phonics, naturally: Reading and writing for real purposes. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Curriculum Development Council. (2004). English Language curriculum guide: Primary 1-6. Hong Kong: Curriculum Development Council.

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Dalton, C., & Seidlhofer, B. (1994). Pronunciation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davidson, R. K., & Strucker, J. (2002). Patterns of Word Recognition Errors Among

Adult Basic Education Native and Nonnative Speakers of English. NCSALL Research Brief.

Eldredge, J. L. (2004). Phonics for teachers: Self-instruction, methods, and activities. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Merrill Prentice Hall.

Heilman, A. W. (2002). Phonics in proper perspective. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill Prentice Hall.

Holm, A., & Dodd, B. (1996). The effect of first written language on the acquisition of English literacy. Cognition, 59(2), 119-147.

Holt, G. M. (1995). Teaching Low-Level Adult ESL Learners. ERIC Digest: Adjunct Eric Clearinghouse for ESL Literacy Education, Washington D. C.

Hu, C. F. (2003). Phonological memory, phonological awareness, and foreign language word learning. Language Learning, 53(3), 429-462.

Jones, M. L. (1996). Phonics in ESL Literacy Instruction: Functional or Not? Kenworthy, J. (1987). Teaching English pronunciation. London: Longman. Laroy, C. (1995). Pronunciation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richards, J. C. (1990). The language teaching matrix. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press. Richards, J. C., Platt, J., & Platt, H. (1992). Longman dictionary of language teaching

and applied linguistics. London: Longman. Rutherford, W. E. (1987). Second language grammar. London: Longman. Sharwood Smith, M. (1988). Functions of grammar in a language teaching syllabus.

In W. E. Rutherford & M. Sharwood Smith (Eds.), Grammar and second language teaching: A book of readings (pp. 231-249). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

Thornbury, S. (2005). How to teach speaking. Essex: Longman. Yeung, K. K.-y., & Cheung, H. (2005). Learning an English sight vocabulary in

Cantonese-speaking children. Journal of Psychology in Chinese societies, 6(2), 195-214.

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Appendices Worksheet A

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Worksheet B

． Barnaby ．

． Jin Tao ．

． Naomi ．

． Dale ．

． Philippa ．

． Mervyn ．

． Beryl ．

． Kirsten ．

． Yumiko ．

． Jake ．

． Germaine ．

． Clifford ．

． Livia ．

． Theodore ．

． ．

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_____________________ _____________________ _____________________

_____________________ _____________________ _____________________

Worksheet C

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