An Empirical Study On The Application Of Phonics In English Vocabulary Teaching In Pirmary Schools

Vocabulary teaching is an important part in EFL (English as foreign language)teaching. For many decades, vocabulary teaching has been ignored in our primaryEnglish Education. As a result, the vocabulary problem confuses a lot of Englishlearners. English is an alphabetic language system with the consistence betweensounds and letters, hence English learners depend more on phonological skills thanon visual information to acquire more vocabulary. IPA (International PhoneticAlphabet), as the traditional way to teach phonetics, neglects the internal relationshipbetween sounds and letters, which makes learners not decode the words. Phonics hasa long history in western countries and it has been proved to be effective amongnative young children, especially children with reading difficulty.Based on the vocabulary learning situation in Chinese primary schools andpupils’ cognition levels, this study attempted to employ phonics to the teaching ofvocabulary to a group of primary school learners. Specifically, it investigatedwhether the application of phonics in English vocabulary teaching in primary schoolwas effective on developing students’ phonological awareness (PA), word spellingability and word reading ability. The Experimental Group (EG, N=60) and theControl Group (CG, N=60) were chosen from Grade5in a primary school in HeYuan City of Guangdong to participate the study. Phonics method was implementedto the EG who received training in phonics instruction and phonological awarenesswhile teaching vocabulary. The experiment lasted nineteen weeks. The pretest andthe posttest gained from PA tests, word reading tests and word spelling tests led tothe following findings: first, EG participants who received phonics training yieldedmore gains, specifically pupils possessing phonics knowledge could read and spellwords more accurately and fluently than those who lacked of phonics; second, aftertraining, the EG participants who performed badly in pretest gained more than thosewho performed well; third, EG participants became more confident to learnvocabulary. In conclusion, phonics is an effective vocabulary teaching strategies and thatthe low achievers need phonics instruction more than the high achievers. Thefollowing suggestions are recommended:1) Teachers should provide pupilsopportunities to learn and use phonics;2) Teachers should select suitable phonicsteaching content and approaches to meet their need; and3) Texts for reading must beprovided while teaching phonics so that pupils can read words more accurately andfluently.