| The concept of phonological awareness (PA) attracted plenty of attention in the linguistic field from the1970’s. And their studies focused mainly on the relationship between PA and reading abilities. These research findings show that the higher grades, the better PA they have. They also find that Chinese has a positive effect on students’syllable awareness of PA, and the same is true for their English reading abilities. All these research findings show that English PA plays a crucial role in the English learning for Chinese students. However, the studies of the relationship between PA and words learning were minimal. Besides, under various teaching instructions, students’English competence hasn’t achieved the expected level.In order to find the defect in the present English teaching instructions, the author took semi-structured questionnaires, observation and analysis of their test papers as a pilot study. From the study, she found that the vocabulary learning was a restrained factor for Chinese young learner’s English learning. Thus, it is necessary to explore a new way of teaching in English vocabulary based on the theory of phonological awareness.Based on the previous study and related theories, the author designed a new instruction for Chinese young learners. The instruction is named as "GAME", which centered on the training of phonological awareness to improve its learners’English vocabulary learning. Here,"G" means Guessing,"A" refers to Authentic context, and "M" for Mind-mapping, and "E" stands for Extended task. This instruction tries to help students to summarize their experience gained in these training materials and then, apply these principles in remembering new words.In order to testify the feasibility and effectiveness of GAME Instruction and whether the "GAME" can cultivate students’PA and make vocabulary learning effective, the author made two experimental studies.The participants of study one was120primary school students from Gongyuan Road Primary School, Taiyuan. Class1was chosen to be an experimental class to instruct by GAME and another was the control class which was under their traditional teaching instruction. The research lasts from October3rd to October28th,2011.The author analyzed all the collected data of the pre-test and post-test by using the Independent-Samples T-Test. And the result shows that the scores of students in the experimental class were higher than those in the control class in words remembering, spelling and reading. And the feasibility and reliability of these test papers were tested.To investigate some slightly changes happened in an individual, study2was designed as a case study of a female student in the experimental class. After observation, communication, and cooperation of3months, the case study indicates that the GAME can not only help students master a better way of learning English words, but also could mold their characters and develop their interest in learning English.The two experimental studies proved that the GAME Instruction can truly make English vocabulary learning more effectively by improving students PA, as well as mold students’ characters and cultivate their learning interest. The meaning of this study exists both in enriching the theory of English teaching, and in making direct reference to English teaching practice.However, there are still some limitations of the study, which are expected to be overcome in the further studies for achieving more in language teaching. |
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