The Impact Of Phonics Instruction On Spelling Development

Phonics drew great attention of researchers in western countries in1960s. The relationship between phonics and word decoding or reading was mostly examined. In1990s, Chinese researchers began to focus on phonics. However, fewer researchers carried out the case study of spelling development.The subject of the study, Mike is an eight-year-old Chinese boy who has received four months’ English instruction from the tutor before the study. The findings and discussions associated with Mike’s spelling development during phonics instruction were on the basis of data collected by means of audio recording, diary records and think-aloud. Through the analysis of the data, it shows that Mike has gone through five stages, precommunicative stage, semi-phonetic stage, phonetic stage, transitional stage and correct stage. On precommunicative stage, Mike’s invented spellings were affected by pinyin. But his spelling ability was related with knowledge of pinyin, letter-name, and letter-sound correspondence on semi-phonetic stage and phonetic stage. And transitional spellings were influenced by orthographic awareness instead of pinyin. And Mike could adopt phonemic and orthographic knowledge and read some simple dialogues on correct stage.Finally, the limitations and suggestions are put forward with regard to the number of the subjects and the length of research time.