Research question 1c

To what extent do the phonics rules taught in the textbooks prepare learners for the acquisition of the 1200 basic words, the vocabulary in each lesson and all the sounds in American English?

Appendix 4.1 shows the result of the comparisons between phonics rules in the textbooks and the rules inherent in the 1200 words. Table 4.5 lists the percentage of the rules covered in each set of the textbooks.

Table 4.5 Percentage of rules covered in the textbooks Textbook Total number of

rules Percentage HE 81 36.8 % JE 91 41.3% HD 64 29 % NEW 48 21.8 % ML 69 31.3% GS 47 21.3 %

As the table indicates, great disparities were found among the textbooks in the number of rules taught in four years of English education. Joy English teaches the highest number of rules, covering 41.3% of the sound-letter associations needed for sounding out the 1200 basic words, while Go SuperKids taught only 21.3% of the rules. Such a result suggests that how much phonics knowledge learners acquire is strongly influenced by the textbook they use, which may partly explain the discrepancies between learners’ phonics knowledge by the time they enter junior high school. It cannot be denied, however, that as the exposure to printed words increases, learners may be able to figure out more sound-letter associations without being taught.

Nonetheless, as learner ability differs, it is hard to judge how many rules each individual learner is able to infer.

In general all the textbooks failed to cover the majority of the rules governing the 1200 basic words. Considering the limited time available for phonics teaching, such an outcome is understandable and yet it does indicate the limitations and challenges facing learners if phonics is the only means of retrieving word sounds outside classroom teaching. If the ability to tackle the basic 1200 words using phonics is the ultimate target, then to maximize the effect of phonics instruction within the time scope, it is logical to assume that the selection of rules take into consideration the frequency of occurrence of the rules. Although each set of textbooks covers more than 50% of high frequency rules (rules that have more than twenty occurrences in the 1200 words), even the series that covered the highest percentage of the high

frequency rules (Happy English) covered only 73% (Table 4.6). Analysis of the rules that are included in the textbooks also reveals that not all the rules are in the list of high frequency rules. In fact, as Table 4.6 and 4.7 show, although the number of rules covered in New Wow English and Go Superkids are amongst the lowest, the majority of their rules are high frequency. On the contrary, though Joy English has the highest number of rules, only 44% of the rules are high frequency.

Textbook Percentage HE 73% JE 71% HD 68% NWE 66% ML 67% GS 59%

Table 4.7 Percentage of the rules covered in the textbooks that are high frequency. Textbook Percentage HE 51% JE 44% HD 59% NWE 77% ML 55% GS 70%

A look at the distribution of the rules in the textbooks (Figure 4.1) further reinforces the evidence that different decision making processes might be involved in the selection of the rules to be taught in each set of textbooks. Of all the rules, only 29% are shared by all the textbooks while 20% of the rules are unique to one textbook.

None of the textbooks provide an explanation for the selection of the rules and neither does the result of the analysis provide clues to the rationale behind the selection. What seems to be evident, however, is that none of the textbooks covers sufficient rules to enable learners to tackle (i.e., to segment and to spell) the majority of the 1200 basic words and that neither do they set the decoding of the 1200 basic words as the ultimate aim of phonics teaching. What then determines the selection of the rules in the textbooks? In order to discover whether the selection of the rules is determined by the vocabulary of the lessons, the extent to which learners can use the phonics rules accumulated through the lessons to sound out words in each lesson was examined. The result is shown in Appendix 4.2 with the words that can be sounded out in bold. Table 4.8 lists the percentage of phonically regular words categorized as vocabulary for production and vocabulary for recognition in each set of the textbooks. The result shows that consistent with the previous analysis,

disparities exist across the textbooks. While 24% of vocabulary for production in Happy English and Magic Land can be sounded out with its phonics rules, the same applies to only 7% of the vocabulary in Go SuperKids. With

vocabulary for recognition, the difference is even more significant with the highest (Happy English) at 46% of the vocabulary and the lowest only 11% (Hello Darbie). It may appear that some of the textbook writers take into account the phonics regularity of the vocabulary in selecting and arranging phonics rules to be taught in each lesson more than others. However, because of the low percentage of phonically decodable vocabulary across the

textbooks in general, it is doubtful whether phonic regularity of the vocabulary contributes to the decision behind the selection of the phonics rules. Further support for this observation can be found by comparing the percentage of phonically regular words in vocabulary for production and for recognition. If phonics regularity is taken into account, then the result should demonstrate a higher percentage of phonically regular words in the vocabulary for production. This is only true however in Hello Darbie and Magic Land; in the remainder, a higher percentage of phonically regular words are found in vocabulary for recognition. In general, the great majority of the vocabulary in the textbooks cannot be successfully decoded using the phonics rules taught.

Table 4.8 The percentage of words that can be sounded out using the phonics rules taught

production recognition HE 24% 46% JE 22% 31% HD 14% 11% NWE 22% 25% ML 24 18% GS 7% 14%

All the textbooks covered the majority of the 41 phonemes in American English (Table 4.9). When comparisons are made of the total number of phonics rules in the textbooks with the number of phonemes the rules

represent, signs of the conscious efforts on the part of the textbook writers to include as many phonemes as possible become evident. For instance,

although New Wow English covers only 48 phonics rules, the rules represent 39 of the phonemes. It appears that instead of selecting rules on the basis of its frequency of occurrence, textbook writers are more concerned with

including a variety of different phonemes when selecting phonics rules. If the content of a textbook is a reflection of what is in the mind of the writers, then the result suggests that the writers of the textbooks intend phonics to be a means by which learners learn the sounds of the language. However, despite this, none of the textbooks cover all the sounds in American English in four years of primary school English education.

Table 4.9 Phonemes and phonics rules covered in the textbooks The number of Percentage Phonemes that are

phonemes covered in the textbooks

covered by all the textbooks

HE 39 95% /b/, /k/, /d/, /f/, /g/, /h/, /j/, /l/,

/m/, /n/, /p/, /r/, /s/, /t/, /v/, /w/, /z/, / ð/, /θ/, /dʒ/, /i/, /0/, /e/, /G/, /o/, /ɔ/, /u/, /a/, /æ /,

/ʌ/, /ɑɪ/ JE 39 95% HD 39 95% NWE 39 95% ML 37 90% GS 32 78%

The results of the analysis indicate that none of the textbooks include a sufficient number of phonics rules to enable learners to tackle the majority of either the basic 1200 words or the main vocabulary in each lesson. If the expectation is for learners to apply phonics knowledge and skill in the process of learning then they must know as many of the rules as possible. The fewer rules learners know, the less reliable phonics will appear as a means to

retrieve word sounds. Since the textbooks adopt the ‘look and say’ whole word approach in the teaching of the main vocabulary, it can be argued that the learners do not require phonics knowledge to retrieve the sounds of words. However, the presupposition is that every learner receives sufficient exposure and practice in the classroom. As learner ability varies, it is questionable whether such a presumption is valid. Without an independent means by which learners can reliably retrieve the sounds of words, it is highly plausible that the learners for whom classroom exposure is not sufficient for the acquisition of the vocabulary will develop their own system of marking the sounds of words

spelling, the lack of sufficient phonics knowledge may cause the learners to be over-reliant on non-phonics strategies.

The fact that the textbooks cover a very limited number of all the rules needed also revealed the challenges and complications of regarding phonics as a pronunciation instruction approach. For phonics to serve the purpose

satisfactorily, the inclusion of a large number of rules is required. However, as primary school learners are still at the foundation building stage and as the communicative purpose of language is greatly emphasized in the national curriculum guidelines, it is questionable whether textbook writers can afford to devote a large part of each lesson to phonics in the time available and still fulfill the other teaching objectives. To prevent learners from relying solely on classroom teaching as the only way of learning word sounds, it is crucial that they are provided with an alternative system by which they can record and retrieve sounds of new words independently at early stages of learning.

Before the inception of primary school English education, beginning learners in junior high school were taught K.K. phonetic symbols which represent the 41 American phonemes along with the skill to segment and assemble the phonemes as a pronunciation tool. As there are only 41 phonemes, the time required for learning K.K. symbols is substantially shorter than learning an adequate number of phonics rules. The MoE does not explain the exclusion of the teaching of phonetic symbols from the primary school English curriculum.

The results of this textbook analysis suggest that using the phonetic symbols may be a more efficient way of gaining access to word sounds than engaging in an extensive phonics programme.