An Empirical Study On Rural Junior High School Learners’ Chinese And English Phonological Awareness

Since Bruce put forward the concept of phonological awareness in 1964,it has been a hot topic of research.There has been comprehensive research on young learners’ phonological awareness,but few on junior high school students’ phonological awareness,especially in rural areas.Based on the above situations,this study explores the PA of junior high school learners in rural locations and the necessity of PA training in daily instruction.There are three research questions in the present study: 1)What are the general features of rural junior high school learners’ Chinese and English phonological awareness? 2)Does learners’ Chinese PA correlate to their English PA? If yes,to what extent? 3)Can phonological training improve learners’ phonological awareness?A 13-week-long teaching experiment was undertaken in a rural junior high school in Lixian,Hunan province,using quantitative and qualitative methodologies.A total of 78 Seventh-graders from two natural classes participated in this experiment,one as the control class and the other as the experimental class.Prior to the teaching experiment in the experimental class,questionnaires were distributed to each student for collecting their basic information and understanding their phonological learning and awareness.And the Chinese and English PAs were pretested.Then,English phonological awareness training was carried out in the experimental class.The subjects’ English PA was post-tested after the training in the experimental class.All collected data were processed and analyzed through SPSS 23.0 for descriptive analysis,content consistency reliability test,and independent sample T-test.The following are the study’s main findings: 1)Learners’ Chinese PA and English PA are poor,their Chinese PA is better than their English PA.In English PA test,learners’ onset-rime awareness is better than their syllable awareness and phoneme awareness.2)There is a significant correlation between the Chinese and English PAs of students.The better Chinese phonological awareness,the better English phonological awareness.3)English PA training aids in the improvement of learners’ English PA.The findings of this study have implications for the teaching of English pronunciation in rural junior high schools.English teachers should understand the necessity of phonological awareness training and add fun training exercises into their classes.