The Effect of Explicit Phonics Instruction on First-Grade Writing

Abstract

Learning to write and composing a story in first grade requires multiple steps of phonemic awareness and phonics. The writing process they use requires more than one simple step of putting words together to make a sentence or story, they need to use their phonemic awareness and phonics skills to create each individual word. This means breaking each individual word up into its sounds and then taking those sounds and writing them down, using the known phonics patterns, on a piece of paper to create the word. This action research study examined the relationship between explicit phonics instruction and writing capabilities in first grade students of different learning abilities.