Word recognition competence of esl Thai primary school students with phonics and whole word identification strategies

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of word identification strategies on second language (L2) word recognition. The issue to be investigated was whether word identification strategies developed through phonic and whole word teaching approaches would distinguishingly affect students’ word recognition skills Previous work in linguistics has suggested that learners with phonic background establish and rely on phonological strategy (sound strategy), while those with whole word background develop and rely on orthographic strategy (visual strategy). An experimental task, the naming task, was conducted to 50 primary-school learners of English with contrasting word identification strategies: the phonological strategy established via the Phonics Approach and orthographic strategy developed through the Whole-Word Approach. The lexicality in the stimuli was controlled to explore the learners’ dependence on phonological information in word recognition. The performance of the two ESL groups will be compared on the vasis of reaction time and accuracy. The results for the naming task indicate a) there were no significant differences in reaction time across all stimulus conditions between the two groups; b) the influence of the frequency effect on the performances on accuracy of the two groups were found in high-frequency and nonwords conditions; and c) the similar frequency effects were found across the three stimulus conditions with each group.