The Influence Of Phonics Instruction On Junior School Students' English Phonological Awareness

From the 1970's, the concept of phonological awareness (PA) attracted plenty of attention in the linguistic research field in the western countries. Most of the researches in western countries focus on the relationship between PA and reading abilities, and their subjects are mainly the adolescents who are native English speakers. However, in China, the researches about PA have just appeared in recent years, more and more scholars in our country become concentrated on this research field. Their researches mainly concerns about the such questions as Chinese children'English PA development, Chinese Pinyin's positive or negative influence on Chinese students'English PA and the relationship between PA and Chinese students'English reading abilities as well. And most of the conclusions of these researches are positive. These research findings shows that the higher grades the students'are in, the better their PA is, Chinese Pinyin has a positive effect on students'syllable awareness of PA, and children's PA has a positive relevance to their English reading abilities. All these research findings show that English PA plays a very important role in the English learning for Chinese students. Therefore, how to improve students'phonological awareness to make the English teaching process more effective is the significance of this thesis.Meanwhile, a lot of researches and theories in the USA made phonics method the leading method to teach English reading in the second half of 20th century. Due to the advantages of answering for children's cognitive characteristics and effective teaching of phonics, the method became the leading teaching method in the USA, until now. Moreover, some other researches in western countries and in China show that phonics instruction has a positive influence on improving students'reading abilities, word spelling and the learning of form-sound knowledge. These learning processes have some certain connections to PA, especially in the level of phonemic awareness of PA. As a teaching method, phonics concentrates on the "building blocks" of written language - knowledge of the alphabet and of the sounds (called phonemes) formed by letters individually and in combination, mainly English phonemes. And until now, the researches about specific connections between PA and phonics are still a blank in China as the literature review stated. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to explore the inner relationship between PA and phonics instruction.Based on some English phonics teaching methods in English-speaking countries and China, the author designed a teaching procedure, in which phonics instruction, teaching of IPA(International Phonetic Alphabet) and teaching pronouncing rules of vowels and consonants were combined together as a whole teaching process. The research subjects are from different junior middle school of Jinchang, they were studying in a summer school in Jinchang city of Gansu Province, which is named Hope Summer School. Before and after the fifteen-day experiment, the students'PA levels were assessed; the tests used in the assessment include four kinds of tasks including the task of accounting phonemes, judging the rhyming, omitting the phonemes and reversing phonemes. These tasks are used to examine how PA has been affected in different dimensions such as phonemic awareness and rhyming awareness after the experiment. The conclusion of the study shows that the systematic phonics instruction can significantly improve students'PA. Among the four dimensions of PA, phonemic awareness has been most significantly improved after the teaching process, but the rhyming awareness are not significantly changed. The result indicates that phonics can improve students'PA, in which the deep PA---phonemic awareness is the one that is improved most. Therefore, the relationship between phonemic awareness and phonics is the closest one.This research focuses on the exploration of the relation between PA and phonics instruction, getting the positive conclusion that phonics instruction can improve students'PA. It is a preparatory attempt on this theme. It may bore some referential value to further relative studies in these field, and it may gives some implications to the application of English teaching methods in junior middle schools of China; then, it may also offer some references and enlightenment to further studies in this field. However, because of certain restrictions, there are still some limitations in the study, and these limitations are expected to be overcome in the further relative studies in the future.