Effectiveness of phonics instruction on simple word reading of Thai English as a foreign language first graders

The purposes of this study were to compare the results of simple English words reading before and after learning through phonics instruction and to investigate whether there were problematic letters for the learners to pronounce. The participants were seven Thai EFL first graders (Pratom Sueksa 1 students) studying Fundamental English Course at Ban Hong-Kah School, Rasisalai District, Sisaket Province, Thailand. They were in the second semester of the academic year 2014. The experimental instruments were 7 lesson plans of one-hour learning period each. The data collecting instrument were the comparative pre-test and post-test made up of two word reading lists containing 25 CVC words. The scoring tables were also used to distinguish the problematic letters for the learners to pronounce.
The findings of this study were that phonics instruction seemed to help promote simple English word reading of the students and that consonant letters seemed to be more problematic than vowel letters.