Developing Phonics Material to Improve the Spoken English of Indonesian Tertiary Students
Abstract
Phonics is generally known as the subject that teaches correspondence between the written and the spoken word aimed to enhance the reading skill of children in first language acquisition setting. In an EFL (English as Foreign Language) environment, like international kindergartens in Indonesia, Phonics lessons are usually included in their syllabus. After teaching English conversation for a few years in a tertiary institute in Indonesia, the writer suspected that phonetic awareness might also benefit not just children, but adults as well. In a previous experiment, the writer did an Error Analysis on samples of the students’ speech, and found that some speaking inaccuracy in terms of pronunciation could perhaps be addressed by developing and selecting Phonics material that will deal with those more frequently-committed errors in the students’ speech. This research was designed as a qualitative one, employing observation and short survey as the data-collection method. The subjects were students in an intact English Conversation class. They were first made to read a text which has the frequently-committed errors in terms of pronunciation at the beginning of the semester. The Phonics material was then taught explicitly in each conversation class consisting of five meetings. Finally, the students were given a short survey to gauge their assimilation and the effectiveness of the Phonics material.
Keywords: phonics, english speaking, error analysis
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