A Case Study of Phonics Instruction and its Effect towards Students Phonemic Awareness in a Japanese Elementary School

Introduction: Overview of Phonics Instruction Worldwide According to Adams (1990), "phonics refers to a system of teaching reading that builds on the alphabetic principle, a system of which a central component is the teaching of correspondences between letters or groups of letters and their pronunciations" (p.50).Phonics was developed by elementary school teachers in the United States in the 1800s to help children who have difficulty learning to speU (Takeda, 2007).At present, phonics instruction is widely used not only for native speakers in English-speaking countries, but also all over the world for ESL and EFL learners.Plenty of studies have proved .thatphonics has an important role in the fundamental skill of reading literacy.Whitehurst and Lonigan (2001) reported that the foundational skills of phonological processing print-awareness and oral-language influence learning to read.Their report indicates that those who lack these skills would have problems with reading.Awareness of the alphabet is also an important skill for reading literacy.Since English utilizes phonograms, or (a letter or combination of letters that represent a sound), it is impossible to develop reading skills without knowing the pronunciation of each phoneme (A]lenTamai, 2013).Phonics .lessonsenable learners to acquire this knowledge and relevant skills.However, there are also controversial issues related to phonics instruction.One of them is in regards to when to introduce phonics.Many researchers suggest that phonics should be introduced at an early stage of English learning.Research has proved that there is a positive relationship between the awareness of sounds in spoken words and the stage at which literacy acquisition begins (Allen-Tamai, 2013).In the case of the current English education in Japan, students' first exposure to English sounds in a school setting begins in the 5 th grade of elementary school.This section will discuss the English phonemes and what problems Japanese learners might experience.Next, it will discuss the effect of '