The Use of Phonological Awareness Instruction in Improving English Word Reading Ability of Thai Primary Students

Abstract

English word reading is a necessary skill for students who learn English as a foreign language. It is the process to obtain the meaning from the written text. As phonological awareness instruction assists students in word reading, this present study attempt to examine the effect of phonological awareness instruction in improving English word reading in Thai second grade students and investigate features of the phonological awareness instruction that improve students’ English word reading ability. Phonological awareness instruction was adopted as an instructional strategy proposed to improve students’ English word reading. The participants consisted of twelve second grade students who study in a small-type school in northeastern of Thailand. The implementation of the current study lasted six weeks with 55 minutes of in each section of English instruction every day. The instruments for collecting the data were English word reading pretest and posttest, and a student semi-structure interview. The finding of the study showed that there was a statistically significant difference between students’ English word reading ability after using phonological awareness at the 0.05 level. According to students’ semi-structure interview, it was show that letter-sound knowledge and phoneme awareness help students in reading word the most.

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