The Effect Of English Phonological Awareness Training On Children’s Chinese Phonological Awareness And Early Reading Abilities

Phonological awareness has been identified as an important factor in the development of literacy and it has been studied for over twenty years. The aims of this study are to figure out the relationships between students’phonological awareness and Chinese early reading abilities and the effects of English phonological awareness training on early Chinese reading abilities among Chinese young learners of English as a foreign language. Three research questions need to be solved in this study, namely:1) is there any relationship between their Chinese phonological awareness and Chinese early reading abilities?2) Is there any relationship between English phonological awareness and Chinese early reading abilities?3) Does the instruction of English phonological awareness have any effects on Chinese phonological awareness and Chinese reading ability?To address these questions two intact classes of Grade three were randomly chosen from a primary school in Jimo of Shandong Province. One was treated as experimental group, while the other control group. The experimental group received phonological awareness training in English and the control group received no such training. Pre-and post-tests of phonological awareness in English and Chinese as well as reading ability in Chinese were administered to both groups in order to gauge their performance in phonological awareness and reading abilities over the period of one-semester treatment. The English phonological awareness tests include onset oddity test, rime oddity test and onset-rime blending test; the Chinese phonological awareness tests include onset oddity test, rime oddity test, tone oddity test and deletion test; the Chinese reading ability tests consist of two-character word writing test and sentence recognizing test. Among them onset oddity test, rime oddity test, tone oddity test and reading ability tests were measured collectively while onset-rime blending test and deletion test were done individually. After the collection of the data, correlation analysis, independent-sample t-test and paired-samples t-test were conducted. According to the correlation analysis, there were close correlations among English phonological awareness, Chinese phonological awareness and Chinese reading abilities. And results indicate significant improvements for the experimental group on both Chinese phonological awareness and Chinese reading abilities. In other words, English phonological awareness training effectively promoted the development of both Chinese phonological awareness and Chinese reading abilities in these students.This study has significant implications for foreign language teaching practice in primary school. It provides insightful information for foreign language teachers to value the importance of phonological awareness instruction. However, owing to the small size of the subjects and the complexity of factors contributing to phonological awareness improvement, limitations also exist in this study. Thus more efforts are still needed to conduct further research on phonological awareness training.