Development of Phonemic Awareness in the Poetry Sequence: A Case Study on French EFL Learners
ABSTRACT
This paper aims to find out the influence from poetry learning on pupils’ phonemic awareness in the context of English as a foreign language in France. Theories of metalinguistic awareness and cognitive poetics are applied as the theoretical framework. A pre-test and a post-test are conducted on French pupils before and after the poetry sequence in English lessons, with a questionnaire as a feedback following the finished sequence. As the French pupils are the beginners of English learning, phoneme identification test has been conducted. Paired samples t-test, correlation and a scatter plot are employed with the software SPSS to analyzed the data, in order to answer both research questions. It is shown that series activities in poetry sequence help increase pupils’ phonemic awareness; whereas pupils’ learning gains of phonemic awareness and part of their feedback on poetry sequence are not correlated. With the findings, the development of phonemic awareness and the possible reasons on the un-correlation are further discussed based on the theory of cognitive poetics and metalinguistic awareness.
KEYWORDS
Phonemic Awareness, English as a Foreign Language, Poetry, Cognitive Poetics