Paper Title
The Role of a Phonic Intervention Programme in Developing Reading Skills in Second Language Acquisition of English for Struggling Readers in Bahrain

Abstract
This study investigated the effects of synthetic phonics instructions in developing reading skills for struggling readers learning English as a second language in Bahrain. A 4 weeks intervention programme designed around the module Jolly Phonics with a focus on phonological awareness was delivered to small groups by qualified teachers to two experimental groups. There was a control group receiving formal education services in the form of one-to-one sessions. All students were assessed on the DIBELS measures before and after receiving the intervention programmes. The results indicate that students receiving the synthetic phonics instructions significantly outperformed the control group on the DIBELS measure Initial Sound Fluency, Letter Naming Fluency, Phoneme Segmentation Fluency, and Nonsense Word Fluency on the posttests. Paired-samples t-test statistic results indicate that there is no significant difference between the results of the two experimental groups on the posttests. The findings suggest that a synthetic phonic intervention programme has a significant effect on the development of reading skills for struggling readers learning English as a second language and whose first language is Arabic. Keywords- Phonology, Intervention, Second Language, Reading, Phonics Instructions.