The Impact of Using Multisensory Synthetic Phonics on Iranian Young EFL Learners Reading and Spelling: The Case of Diphthongs and Digraphs

This study aimed at investigating the effects of synthetic multisensory phonics instruction (i.e. Jolly Phonics) on Iranian young learners of diphthongs anddigraphs. To this end, 32 young female beginners of English ages 8 to 11 participated in this study. Following a convenient sampling method and pretestposttestdesign, two intact classes were recruited from an institute in Amol, Mazandaran. One class served as the experimental group receiving JollyPhonics program and the other forming the control group received reading instruction through the traditional phonics approach. The study took place overa time span of 12weeks including 24 teaching sessions. Quantitative and qualitative methods were employed to analyze the collected data. Using theSPSS 23, the analysis of the pretest-posttest scores revealed the outperformance of the experimental group over the control group on the reading and spellingtests. The qualitative analysis of the collected questionnaire also confirmed that Jolly Phonics instruction is a reader-friendly and enjoyable procedure to teach L2 reading at the kids’ level. On implication side, the study suggests that Jolly Phonics method has the potential to rule out the complexities and difficulties of learning to read and write in EFL classrooms.

Keywords:

synthetic phonics , multisensory approach , Jolly Phonics , L2 Reading , EFL young learner , Spelling