Effects of the Revelational Phonics Approach on Chinese L1 EFL Beginners’ Knowledge of the English Alphabetic Principle: Further Evidence from ‘Whole Word’, ‘Single Letter-Sound’, and ‘Digraph’ Reading

Effects of two phonics courses on Chinese L1 EFL beginner readers’ knowledge of the English alphabetic principle were compared. Two groups of children with matched baselines received aphonics course designed with the gist of either the existing phonics practice within Taiwan’s Primary English education (the EPP) or the Revelational Phonics Approach (the RPA). Fundamental differences set the two courses apart: (1) the EPP defers the teaching of digraph rules until single letter-sound rules have all been introduced via the ‘one English letter to one sound’ indoctrination, while the RPA proposes that whenever a single letter-sound rule is taught, digraph rules headed by the letter are also immediately introduced; (2) the EPP follows the teaching steps of segmentation, conversion, and phoneme blending for word reading, while the RPA follows the teaching steps of digraph identification, segmentation, conversion, and phoneme blending for word reading; and (3) the EPP employs ‘encoding’ activities that * Associate Professor, Department of English, National Dong Hwa University, E-mail: [email protected]. The author would like to thank the editors and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. Chang Gung Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 8:2 (October 2015), 347-379 Chang Gung Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 8:2 (2015) .348. tax one’s orthographic knowledge, while the RPA employs ‘decoding’ activities that tax one’s knowledge of the alphabetic principle. Results show that the RPA group outperformed the EPP group across the board: on ‘whole word’, ‘single letter-sound’, and ‘digraph’ reading.