The effect of using synthetic multisensory phonics in teaching literacy on EFL young learners' literacy learning

Abstract

The present study sought to investigate the effect of adopting synthetic multisensory phonics (i.e. Jolly Phonics) for teaching early English literacy skills on literacy learning of Iranian EFL young learners. To this end, 100 zero-beginners of English aged between 10 to 12 participated in this study. The participants were randomly assigned to either experimental or control classes. While the students in the control group were taught basic English literacy skills through the rote traditional phonics, the learners in the experimental group were taught English literacy via a synthetic multisensory phonics approach named Jolly Phonics. After a one-month English course, all the participants took a reading and a spelling test. A set of descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyse students’ scores obtained from these tests. The results demonstrated that the experimental (Jolly Phonics) group had a better performance on the reading and spelling tests.