The Effect Of Phonological Awareness Training On The Development Of Children’s Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness has been identified as a key factor influencing literacy development over the last two decades. The main focus of this study is to investigate the effect of second language phonological awareness training on the development of phonological awareness in both the first and second languages in child English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners. Three research questions are to be answered:1) Does English phonological awareness training contribute to the development of phonological awareness in English?2) Will the English phonological awareness training help to heighten Chinese EFL children’s phonological awareness in Chinese?To address these questions, two intact classes of grade3are randomly chosen from a Primary school of Lixia District in Ji Nan of Shandong Province, and one is treated as experimental group, the other control group. The experimental group receives phonological awareness training in English and the control group receives no such training. Pre-and post-tests of phonological awareness in both English and Chinese are administered to both groups in order to gauge improvements in phonological awareness over the period of one-semester treatment. Each test includes the following phonological awareness tasks: rime detection, onset detection, onset-rime blending, Chinese tone detection, and pinyin ability. Results indicate that there are Significant improvements for the experimental group on all English and Chinese phonological awareness tasks. In other words, English phonological awareness training effectively promotes the development of both English and Chinese phonological awareness in child EFL learners.This study has significant implications for foreign language teaching practice in primary school. It provides insightful information for foreign language teachers to value the important role of phonological awareness in language teaching. However, owing to the complexity of factors contributing to phonological awareness improvement, this study still has some limitations. Thus efforts are still needed to conduct further research in order to provide insight on this issue in second language acquisition.