日本人児童の音韻認識能力向上におけるシンセティック・フォニックス指導の効果

本研究は，小学校2年生を対象に英語の読み書き能力を養うための1つの指導法であるシンセティック・フォニックス指導を行い，音韻認識能力の発達が促進されるかどうかを検討することを目的としたものである。17名の児童を対象に，英語の読み書きのための6つの活動で構成されている約10分間のシンセティック・フォニックス指導を計12回行った。事前テストと事後テストは，Open Oddity Task（単語の初めの音に注目）とEnd Oddity Task（単語の終わりの音に注目）の2種類の課題を実施し，児童は4つの単語のうち他の3つの単語と異なる音声的特徴を持つ単語（odd word）を選択した。その結果，指導によって児童の音韻認識能力が向上していたことが示唆され，課題の種類にかかわらず効果があったことが示された。

This study examined whether English literacy instruction given to Japanese second-grade elementary school students facilitated the development of their phonemic awareness. Two research questions were set: (1) Can synthetic phonics instruction improve the phonemic awareness of elementary school students? and (2) Are there differences in the effects of synthetic phonics instruction depending on the different types of the Phoneme Oddity Task? A total of twelve sessions of synthetic phonics instruction were given to 17 Japanese second-grade elementary school students. The instruction consisted of six activities for English reading and writing. A pretest was administered the day before the first instruction, and a posttest was given three days after the last instruction. For the tests, all participants had a Phoneme Oddity Task. There were two types of tasks in the Phoneme Oddity Task:an Open Oddity task, focusing on the first sound of a word, and an End Oddity task, focusing on the last sound of a word, where the participants tried to identify the odd word out that has different phonetic characteristics than the other three words after listening to four words. The results showed that (1) phonological awareness was improved, and (2) there was no significant difference in the effectiveness of the instruction depending on the type of task.