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This study aimed to develop phonics textbook selection criteria and to present the analysis of English teachers’ point of views of the phonics textbook designs and the items that are influential to their selection decisions. The researcher intended to provide some implications for English teachers, phonics textbook designers and the English teacher training course designers.
The validity of phonics textbook selection criteria was developed based on literature review and the suggestions of ten scholars whose specialties were at linguistics, reading and English teaching methodology and those of six elementary English teachers. The reliability was obtained from the interjudge reliability of six phonics textbooks. The results showed that both phonics student textbooks and the whole set of phonics textbooks reached .001 significance.
In addition, part of the phonics textbook selection criteria was transformed to the questionnaire to investigate the opinions about phonics selection and designs from English teachers of different background. The samples were chosen from all the Kaohsiung elementary English teachers and the students that studied English teaching courses at Tainan Teachers College, Pingtung Teachers College and Kaohsiung Normal University. χ2 test showed that some items reached .05 or .01 significance.
According to the results of this study, the main conclusions were shown in the three fields as follows:
1. Phonics textbook selection criteria
(1) Phonics textbook selection criteria should be based on the literature review of current phonics teaching methodology.
(2) There should be different scoring systems among different criteria for the evaluators to choose textbooks of good characteristics.
(3) The titles of each evaluation category should be clear enough and be applied to every phonics textbook.
(4) The category and the items under each category should be contradictory to each other.
(5) Each item should be clearly, positively, sufficiently and objectively illustrated and be easily evaluated.
(6) The numbers of the evaluation items should not be too many lest evaluators be unwilling to use the criteria. Besides, too many items may leave too much limitation for textbook designers.
(7) The items should be suitable to the educational systems in Taiwan.
(8) Phonics textbook selection criteria of this study is a proper tool for evaluating phonics textbooks in Taiwan.
2. Phonics textbook designs
(1) Phonics learning activities are the most important parts for designing phonics textbooks.
(2) Listening, sounding out and the characteristic of “easy to do” should be the focus of activity design.
(3) Useful supplementary materials should be added.
(4) Words for practice in each unit should be carefully selected.
(5) The story should be easy, short, interesting, of different subjects and related to children’s experiences.
(6) Careful selection of simple, useful, sufficient, high frequent orthographic elements is necessary.
(7) The design of phonics textbook should be simple, useful, easy to learn and of proper quantity.
3. Current phonics teaching situations and the opinions of the usage of phonics textbooks.
(1) Phonics teaching is valuable.
(2) Give proper phonics teaching according to students’ age and level.
(3) English teaching hours, the funds of textbooks and the number of students limit the teaching of phonics.
(4) Teachers’ professionalism influences their motif and result of teaching phonics.
The suggestions were given as follows:
1. Phonics textbook designers in Taiwan should take activities, video tapes, word selection, teachers’ manuals, teaching arrangement, illustrations and pictures, the order of orthographic elements, stories and its quantity into serious consideration.
2. More teaching hours and textbook funds should be increased for elementary English teachers to design phonics programs and put them into practice.
3. Phonics teaching training courses and practice should be added to elementary English teacher training programs.
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