NAOKO HASHIGUCHI (千葉大学)

INVESTIGATION OF PHONEMIC AWARENESS IN THIRD-GRADE PRIMARY SCHOOL STUDENTS BEFORE LEARNING THE ALPHABET AND ROMAJI : TEACHING YOUNGER LEARNERS

This study investigates the extent to which 53 third-grade students at a public primary school before learning the alphabet and romaji were able to find a connection between sounds and letters of English. In Japan’s Course of Study (2017), third-grade primary school students learn only the names and forms of the uppercase letters of the alphabet in their Foreign Language Activities lessons. On the other hand, as part of their study of romaji in Japanese, they learn both uppercase and lowercase letters of the alphabet and how to read them with more units. Romaji is the Roman alphabetization of the Japanese language. To conduct this study, a multiple-choice test was created and administered in which students were asked to listen to a phoneme and choose the letter that matched the sound. The results showed that even students who had not yet learned the alphabet and romaji were able to estimate the letter from the phoneme to a larger extent (M =61.76%). The results also showed that the letter name reading of the alphabet influenced this estimation. The information obtained in this study on the phonemic and phonological acquisition of native Japanese-speaking young learners will be informative to connect the sounds and letters of English to those of Asian younger learners from Korea, China, and Thailand, whose native languages do not use alphabetic letters.

Lecturer of English at Junior High School attached to the Faculty of Education, Chiba University since April 2024, and a student of the Master's Course of the Graduate School of Education, Chiba University, obtained a Bachelor of Education in March 2024.