Examining Phonemic Awareness Activities in English Textbooks for a 3rd and 4th Grade Group

The 2009 revised national curriculum emphasizes English as a spoken language in English education in elementary school. If a spoken language is focused in English education, phonemic awareness needs to be taught in the early stage of children's oral language development because it allows students to gain abilities to manipulate English sounds. Studies on phonemic awareness found that it is also closely related to children's reading, writing, and word recognition abilities. This study examines if the recently published five different English textbooks for a 3rd and 4th grade group suggest phonemic awareness activities, and if they do, what kinds of phonemic awareness activities are suggested. The results showed that phonemic awareness activities lack in all five textbooks. Few phonics activities can be implemented as phonemic awareness activities, but it cannot be considered that these textbooks intentionally planned phonemic awareness activities. The future national curriculum of English needs to make a clear statement on students' learning goals for phonemic awareness. Even though current English textbooks do not suggest phonemic awareness activities, teachers should bring phonemic awareness activities and create opportunities for children to manipulate sounds in English.