The Effect Of Phonological Awareness Training For Child EFL Learners

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship of a second language phonological awareness training to the development of phonological awareness in both the first and second languages in child English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners. This issue is important for three reasons. First,"English fever"exists in china, leading to a phenomenon of advocating a start as early as possible for English education. Second, the importance of phonological awareness to beginning reading success cannot be disputed. The last but not least, few studies have touched upon the value of phonological awareness training in child EFL learners whose native language is Chinese.There are three main questions to the present investigation. First, to what extent does English phonological awareness training contribute to the development of phonological awareness in English? Second, will the English phonological awareness training help to heighten Chinese EFL kindergarteners'phonological awareness in Chinese? Third, is there cross-language transfer of phonological awareness between English and Chinese? To address these questions, 23 subjects are recruited, divided into experimental and control groups. The experimental group receives phonological awareness training in English and the control group receives no such training. Pre- and posttests of phonological awareness in both English and Chinese are administered to both groups in order to gauge improvements in phonological awareness over the period of one-semester treatment. Each test includes the following phonological awareness tasks: rime detection, onset detection and onset-rime blending.Based on the evidence gathered, all of the research questions can be answered affirmatively. Significant improvements for the experimental group on all English and Chinese phonological awareness tasks indicate that English phonological awareness training effectively promotes the development of both English and Chinese phonological awareness in child EFL learners. Results of correlation analysis reveal that there is a close relationship between English phonological awareness and Chinese phonological awareness. It is, therefore, not surprising that the Chinese phonological awareness is heightened after the English phonological awareness training.Theoretically, this study is significant. It provides evidence for the trainability of English phonological awareness in child EFL learners and also for the transfer of English and Chinese phonological awareness. Practically, this study is also significant. English phonological awareness training in child EFL is such a virgin land that the inclusion of English phonological awareness training in the curriculum at least offers an alternative for early English education.