A Study Of Relationship Between English Phonological Awareness And Listening Ability Of Chinese Students

In the recent decades, the research of phonological awareness has been a heated topic in the field of educational psychology, experimental psychology, developmental psychology and psycholinguistics. Phonological awareness is the ability to perceive and manipulate the sounds of spoken words (Goswami & Bryant, 1990). It contains syllable awareness, onset-rime awareness and phoneme awareness. The relationship between phonological awareness and reading is one of the most important research areas in metalinguistic awareness. However, there is relatively rare research concerning the relationship between phonological awareness and listening ability. Therefore, the present study probes into the development characteristics of Chinese students'phonological awareness and the relationship between their phonological awareness and their listening ability.This thesis is divided into six chapters. Chapter One and Two contain a brief introduction illustrating the significance, objectives of the study, and the literature review of phonological awareness. Chapter Three describes the theoretical framework of the study including Gomber (1992)'s epilinguistic awareness and metalinguistic awareness, Treiman & Zukowski (1996)'s heterogeneity of phonological awareness, Anderson (1983, 1990)'s three-phase model, and information processing model. Chapter Four elaborates the research design. 128 Chinese students belonging to grade 3, grade 5 and grade 7 (90 among them provided effective data) participated in the research. Swan & Goswami (1997) and Hulme et al (2002)'s instruments are used to measure three linguistic units of phonological awareness: syllable awareness, onset-rime awareness and phoneme awareness. Eight tasks are involved in measurements of three linguistic units. They are syllable tapping, syllable deletion, onset-rime detection, onset-rime oddity, onset-rime deletion, phoneme detection, phoneme oddity, and phoneme deletion. The listening sections of People Education Press's examination papers are used for testing students'listening ability. Chapter Five is the results and discussion including descriptive statistics, correlational analysis and hierarchical regression analysis.The conclusions of the study in chapter six are shown as follows: 1) In grade 3, grade 5 and grade 7, performance of onset-rime awareness was greater than phoneme awareness and syllable awareness. The general tendency of phonological awareness was rising. 2) Students'phonological awareness is positively correlated with listening ability. Among three linguistic units, phoneme awareness and syllable awareness were strong predictors of listening ability in grade 3. In grade 5 and grade 7, all the three linguistic units were correlated with listening ability. Among eight tasks, syllable tapping, phoneme detection, phoneme oddity and phoneme deletion tasks had significant correlation with listening ability in grade 3. In grade 5 and grade 7, syllable deletion and onset-rime detection tasks had correlation with listening ability besides syllable tapping, phoneme detection, phoneme oddity and phoneme deletion. 3) The path models were set up according to standardized coefficients obtaining from hierarchical regression analysis. The path model 1 indicated phoneme awareness had a significant effect on listening ability of grade 3. Listening ability of grade 5 and grade 7 was affected by both syllable awareness and phoneme awareness. The path model 2, 3 and 4 demonstrated that among eight tasks, syllable tapping task had a significant effect on listening ability of grade 3. Listening ability was influenced by both syllable tapping task and phoneme deletion task in grade 5. In grade 7, listening ability was affected by both syllable tapping task and phoneme detection task.In addition, the findings of the present study suggested that English teachers should not only train students'phonological awareness, increase input and exercises of phonological awareness in listening instructions, but also help them increase their accumulation and use of phonological awareness.