Japanese Fifth and Sixth Grade Students’Vocabulary Knowledge and its Relationship with the Awareness of Letter-Sound Correspondence

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of instruction of the letter-sound correspondence when Japanese elementary school students learn new vocabulary in their English Activities lessons.Ninety-eight fifth and sixth grade students from a public elementary school were assigned to receive vocabulary instruction in three lessons.Forty-seven of these students were instructed in vocabulary with a brief explanation of the letter-sound correspondence, and 51 of them were instructed without any such explanation of the letter-sound correspondence.The effects were measured with three kinds of vocabulary tests: a test to measure the ability to understand phonological information, a test to measure the ability to say words orally, and a test to measure the ability to recognize the orthographic information and identify the meaning in Japanese.The results of this study show that students can better understand what orthographic information stands for when they have a brief explanation of letter-sound correspondence than when they do not.The findings also indicate that students' ability to understand written words are more closely related to their ability to understand phonological information and their ability to say words orally when they have a brief explanation of letter-sound correspondence.The results indicate that instruction with letter-sound correspondence was effective when Japanese elementary school students learned new vocabulary.This study can provide insight into the debate on whether at least an initial portion of English literacy instruction should be introduced in elementary schools in Japan.