The Application Of Phonics Instruction To The English Vocabulary Teaching In Pirmary School

This study investigates whether phonics instruction can facilitate English beginners onword recognition ability. Four specific questions are answered in the present study:(1) Theeffect of phonics instruction on English beginners’ word recognition ability;(2) Therelationship between gender and word recognition ability;(3) The relationship between ageand word recognition;(4) The effect of phonics instruction on students who have learnt26English letters and students who have not.One hundred and twenty students are selected by stratified sampling according to theirdifferent English levels from four intact classes in a public suburban primary school in ShulanCity, Jilin province. As the study also aims at determining whether age and gender playimportant roles in achieving good word recognition ability, the researcher chooses studentsfrom different grade levels aged from6to8, with a certain number of boys and girls. Sixtystudents make up experimental group who receives explicit phonics instruction while theother sixty students serve as the control group who only receives traditional instruction. Sincethirty students form one class, among which a half have alphabetic knowledge and the otherhalf do not, there are altogether four classes, two experimental groups and two control groups.Based on the statistical data, the following results about the effects of phonics instructionon word recognition have been explored:(1) Students under the phonics instructionoutperform the non-phonics students;(2) The mean of girls’ performance is higher than boys’performance within groups;(3) The third grade students（age8）in phonics group do a littlebetter than the first grade students (age6).(4) The effect of phonics instruction is influencedmore or less by the English proficiency level. Students with alphabet knowledge under thephonics instruction do better than students without any English proficiency. But thesignificant value is not very strong. Phonics instruction does have positive effect on word recognition. It is stronglyrecommended that more studies on phonics instruction can be conducted with a larger numberof subjects and with a longer time to reach more valid conclusions.