Effects of phonics instruction on improving the decoding and word reading skills of first-grade English as foreign language students in Ethiopia

Decoding and word-reading skills are foundational for children in English as foreign language environments with limited exposure to the language. Despite the very low reading achievement of students in this area, instructions in Ethiopia primarily rely on whole-word reading rather than grapheme-phoneme correspondence skills to recognize the meaning behind written words. Several studies have investigated the word-reading skills of EFL students using implicit instructional methods; however, studies on the effect of explicit phonics on decoding and word-reading are limited. Thus, the current study aimed to examine whether explicit phonics instruction improves the decoding and word-reading skills of EFL students in Sekota Primary School, Ethiopia. Two grade 1 EFL classes were randomly selected as experimental (N = 28) and control (N = 32) groups. Intervention based on explicit decoding and word reading was conducted for the experimental group for 20–25 minutes each school day over twelve weeks. Test results were measured based on participant pretest and posttest scores, and they were analyzed using a t-test. Results revealed that explicit phonics significantly improved the word-reading skills of the experimental group compared to the control group. Accordingly, this study suggests the necessity of emphasizing phonics to improve the word reading skills of EFL.