A Study On The Relationship Between English Phonological Awareness And Word Spelling Ability Of Junior High Students

During the past few decades,much attention has been paid to the study of English phonological awareness(PA),especially in the field of young English learners’ PA and its relationship with learners’ reading ability.But the influence of PA on word spelling ability(WSA),which can help reveal the reason why vocabulary learning is hard for Chinese students,has not been thoroughly discussed.Moreover,the students in rural areas of China should have deserved more consideration because of the lack of teaching resources.With the expectation to find out more efficient ways to improve WSA of students,this present research aims at finding out the current levels of PA of Grade Eight students in Northwest China,and also tries to investigate the relation between their English PA and WSAThe research questions are as follows:1)What is the current situation of Junior High students’PA and WSA?2)What is the relationship between English PA of Chinese Junior High students and their WSA?3)Which part of PA has the closest relationship with WSA?Based on the experiment with 98 randomly selected Grade 8 students from a Junior High school in a northwest town as subjects,and data obtained from a questionnaire,a PA test and a WSA test,the research got the majoring findings:1)Current level of English PA(M=54.49)and WSA(M=48.97)of the subjects was rather low.They had the most completely development of syllable awareness,the middle level of onset-rime awareness,and the weakest phonemic awareness.2)There is a significant positive correlation between the English PA level of the subjects and their WSA(r=.686).3)Among the elements of PA,awareness of syllables,which has the greatest influence on the ability of word spelling,can best predict WSA(r=.569)This study not only reflected Grade 8 students’ present status of English PA,which is never systematically trained,also revealed that improving the awareness of syllables could help cultivate students’ WSA the most.Meanwhile,it hopes to shed some lights on the English vocabulary teaching in underdeveloped rural areas in China.