Teachers’ Perception and Practice of Phonics Instruction for Young EFL Learners

Phonics instruction has been embraced by EFL learners in Asian countries in recent years. In Vietnam, the growing interest in phonics is reflected in MOET’s set of English learning outcomes applied on the primary level. However, it can be challenging for many teachers as phonics has been taught much less or not at all in conventional classes, and little has been reported on the utility of phonics instruction for Vietnamese young learners. After two years of implementing a systematic synthetic phonics program in two private schools in Hanoi, our students have obtained positive results. Employing such research tools as in-depth interviews with two teachers and observation of over 150 students of three grades, this current paper is to undercover (1) key elements in phonics instruction for young EFL learners and (2) teachers’ perceptions of integrating phonics into the curriculum. In-class presentations and practice as well as teachers’ beliefs were analyzed and discussed. The findings indicated that teachers hold a positive attitude to phonics instruction as their students showed improvements in their reading skills after learning letter-sound correspondences and how to blend sounds together to read words. The paper was an attempt to enrich the literature on phonics instructions for young learners, which has remained a modest research area in Asian and Vietnamese contexts. It also provided a useful reference for future phonics instruction practice.