Effect of synthetic phonics instruction on literacy skills in an ESL setting

In the present study, the effectiveness of a synthetic phonics approach to teaching 10. year old Kannada-speaking children to read English was compared with a modified approach whereby the English letter sounds were also represented by the symbols used in Kannada, thus tapping into pre-existing graphophonological awareness skills. After 5-weeks of instruction, participants taught by the Kannada-mediated synthetic phonics approach performed significantly better on the reading, spelling, and graphophonological tasks than the group taught by synthetic phonics using only English letter-sound correspondences, who in turn performed better than the comparison group taught by the standard non-phonic classroom method. Applying the metalinguistic knowledge of the first language seems to have been beneficial in developing literacy skills in English