Abstract
From firsthand experience as an English teacher in a public elementary school in Taiwan, the researcher observed that many grade one students had difficulty with the subject matter, and especially with tasks related to the alphabet. A review of the literature on alphabetic literacy development and the relationship between age and second language acquisition was undertaken to try to identify the theoretical basis of the observed difficulties. Three major recommendations for changes to the traditional grade one English curriculum arose from this review of literature: (a) teaching of the alphabet should be postponed until later grades, (b) explicit training in English phonological awareness (PA) skills should be offered, and (c) less formal instructional techniques should be employed. The current study seeks to develop an alternative grade one English curriculum based on these recommendations and to empirically test the feasibility of training PA skills without recourse to the alphabet. Two intact first grade classes at a public elementary school in northern Taiwan participated in the study, which lasted for the first semester of grade one. The control group received traditional English instruction and the experimental group received instruction according to the proposed curriculum. Pre- and posttests of PA were administered to both groups in order to gauge improvements in PA skills over the period. Significant improvements for the experimental group on all PA tasks indicate that training in PA skills can be effective even without reference to an alphabetic script. Corroboration of this finding is available from the fact that students in the experimental group who entered first grade with low levels of alphabetic knowledge improved more in PA skills over the period than did students who possessed high levels of such knowledge. A comparison of PA test scores for the two groups showed that while the experimental group did evidence a tendency to improve more in terms of PA test scores, no statistically significant difference existed between the groups. While this indicates that the proposed curriculum is at least as effective as the traditional one at stimulating improvements in PA skills, confounding variables such as the shortness of the treatment period likely prevented the experimental group’s advantage from reaching significance. It is suggested that with further refinement this approach has promise for future application in Taiwanese public elementary schools. Details of the curriculum developed for this study are also discussed.