Phonological Awareness And English Word Spelling Ability Of The Senior High School Students

PA (Phonological Awareness) was put forward first in the1960s. It is a widely usedconcept in western psychology and a large number of linguists are studying on it. Since then,PA has become a hot topic of psycholinguistics and it has been investigated more deeply andmore systematically. However, most studies were conducted to explore the relationshipbetween phonological awareness and reading ability. There were few studies concerning aboutthe relationship between phonological awareness and word spelling ability. And most of thestudies were mainly focused on young native English speakers. Almost few were conducted inEFL learners. Besides, the author finds that EFL learners in China have trouble in Englishword studying. So the author chooses the perspective of the relationship betweenPhonological Awareness and English word spelling ability among Chinese senior high schoolstudents.The present study mainly adopts quantitative approach. This study aims to investigatethe relationship between PA and English word spelling ability. The subjects of the study are19910thgrade EFL learners in Gaomi No.1Middle School in Shandong province. They arefrom two parallel classes. The two questions to be investigated are as follows:1. Canphonological awareness be improved through training at the senior high school level?2. Doesphonological awareness training contribute to students’ English word spelling ability at thesenior high school level? To investigate these two questions effectively, Class5was chosen asthe controlled group and Class6as the experimental group. Before the PA training, studentsfrom both the controlled group and the experimental group were assigned a questionnaire andthey all participated in the pre-tests on PA and word spelling. The outcome of IndependentSamples Test demonstrated that there was no significant difference at the level of both PA andword spelling ability between the two classes. Then the subjects in the experimental groupreceived ten weeks’ PA training, while the controlled group was treated only by using thetraditional teaching method. The PA training activities included PA training at the syllablelevel, PA training at the phoneme level, onset-rime recognition and pseudoword spelling.After the experiment, the two groups were assigned the post-tests on PA and English wordspelling again. Statistics from the tests showed that the mean score of the experimental group was higher than that of the controlled group. And the subjects of the experimental group madegreat progress in their PA and English word spelling ability through PA training.The theoretical significance of the study is that it provides a positive proof of the theorythat PA training can improve EFL learners’ PA. What’s more, a systematic PA training is veryhelpful to improve English learners’ word spelling abilities. The practical significance is to putforward some advice to help English teaching in China. English teachers are expected toconduct a systematic PA training to help students in English word studying.