Effect of synthetic phonics instruction on literacy skills in an ESL setting

•Kannada-speaking children learn to read English well using a synthetic phonics method.•Children do even better if Kannada symbols mediate English letter-sound learning.•Children learning by the non-phonic classroom method make little progress.

In the present study, the effectiveness of a synthetic phonics approach to teaching 10 year old Kannada-speaking children to read English was compared with a modified approach whereby the English letter sounds were also represented by the symbols used in Kannada, thus tapping into pre-existing graphophonological awareness skills. After 5-weeks of instruction, participants taught by the Kannada-mediated synthetic phonics approach performed significantly better on the reading, spelling, and graphophonological tasks than the group taught by synthetic phonics using only English letter–sound correspondences, who in turn performed better than the comparison group taught by the standard non-phonic classroom method. Applying the metalinguistic knowledge of the first language seems to have been beneficial in developing literacy skills in English.