Research On Word Recognition Strategies In English Vocabulary Teaching Among Junior High Underachievers

There are no two leaves that are the same in the world, so are the students. Some students come to junior high school somewhat "wealthier" than their peers when it comes to English learning. As time goes by, those students who start out with some English literacy advantages tend to thrive and grow academically, while their less fortunate peers tend to get left behind and experience inordinate difficulty in English learning, especially in vocabulary learning. Thus, early effective intervention is the key to helping them out.During the past 20 years, the studies of vocabulary acquisition have often been commented on within the fields of phonological awareness and sight words: 1) phonological awareness, which is the awareness of the sound structure of spoken language and its correspondence to a grapheme system, emerged between late-1970s and early-1980s (Bradley and Bryant, 1983). So far, a great number of researches have showed that there is strong connection between the phonological awareness and language competence, especially in reading and spelling ability, and comprehension skills, which are highly correlated to the later academic success, 2) sight words are recognized automatically without the aid of phonetic or analytical strategies. Laberge and Samuels (1974) stressed that being able to identify sight words rapidly was thought to be the most pertinent accomplishment in comprehension skills. Later on, the following researches have also found that insufficient sight vocabulary can contribute to a decrease in the beginning readers' developmental reading skills.Recently, there has been a growing interest in phonological awareness research and sight words research in China. In the light of the findings, the main aim of this study is to use the word recognition strategies, namely phonological awareness strategy and sight words strategy, to teaching vocabulary among junior high underachievers to 1) improve their ability to read and spell unknown words, 2) improve their automaticity of recognizing words and expand their vocabulary base, 3) speed up their reading rate and help them to independently access to texts for comprehension.To reach the goal of the study, 40 junior high underachievers with an average of 24 points per exam in Grade eight were assigned to a control and an experimental group randomly. Both groups learned certain vocabulary through a four-month intervention. However, only the experimental group received the following instructions in class 1) modified Fernald method to learn IPA, 2) rime analysis to generalize letter-sound relationship, 3) flash cards to build sight words bank.The data from the pretest and posttest were computerized by using the Statistical Package for Social Scientist (SPSS). After analyzing, the results of the study show that word recognition strategies facilitate the junior high underachievers' reading process. Not only do they continue to score better and perform well in reading, but related spelling and comprehension skills have also been improved.