Phonics And Junior Middle School Students’Vocabulary Teaching

Though English has been attached great importance in the beginning stages of English learning, the phenomenon of "much time of devotion but low efficiency of production" still exists, especially in those rural areas where education is not well developed. Teachers in those schools adopt very traditional ways of vocabulary teaching so that they can not provide an effective approach in vocabulary teaching and just ignored the training of students’ vocabulary memorizing skills. As a result, the students failed to master the new words in the process of learning. Qiu Jianhua (2005) mentioned in his paper that Chinese learners have the following problems in the process of English vocabulary learning:1) low ability of recognizing words;2) serious pronunciation and spelling problems;3) serious phonetic problems.These are also major problems that bother Hui students’ English vocabulary learning in rural areas in Ningxia. According to the data published in the sixth population census, the Hui people live in Ningxia, which is2,173,800, takes up20.53%of the total Hui population in China, but the Hui students’ schooling in rural areas in Ningxia should worth considering. Most of the Hui students in rural areas lack interest and motivation in schooling and they attach less importance to education for they think that they have other important things to do other than going to school, and so do their parents. Those students who have opportunities to study in school usually have serious spelling and pronunciation problems in English vocabulary learning.Facing these problems, scholars and teachers in our country try to find new methods and models of English teaching. As a result, Phonics was introduced into some parts of our country’s primary and junior middle school students’ English teaching. Though different scholars have different viewpoints on the expression of the definition of phonics, they all emphasize the letter-sound correspondences. That is to say, it is a method of teaching children to read and decode word by learning the letter-sound correspondences. Phonics was first used in America to teach reading in1790s. At that time, this method was mainly used to learn alphabet, word-recognition and text memorization so as to make most people able to read and recite religious books. And it did not cause extensive attention until the1960s in the field of western linguistics. Phonics became the prevailing and dominant method of beginning reading teaching in1990s (He Hua,2007). However, studies on phonics abroad are mostly focus on the relationship between phonics and children’s word decoding and reading ability. And the subjects are mainly children whose mother tongue is English and those children who are at risk readers. Few of the studies pay attention to the children who study English as foreign language or adult who learn English for the first time (He Hua,2007). Therefore, this study hypothesize that phonics is also fit to the Hui students who are beginning learners of English in junior middle school in rural areas.This study was undertaken to test the effectiveness of phonics on vocabulary teaching in junior middle school, especially the Hui students in rural areas. The research questions to be addressed in this study are the following:1. Can the use of phonics help to stimulate Hui students’interests in English learning?2. Can the use of phonics help to improve Hui students’vocabulary acquisition?3. Can the use of phonics help to improve Hui students’language proficiency?The subjects involved in this experimental study were72students of Grade One from two natural classes in Hexi Middle School. Before the experiment, a self-designed questionnaire was distributed to learn students’interests in English learning and their problems existed in English learning. Two achievement test papers were used as the pre-test and post-test paper to check students’language proficiency development before and after the experiment, in addition, four vocabulary test scores in classes were also recorded to understand students’ vocabulary reading and spelling ability. After the experiment, a post-questionnaire was conducted among the students in the experimental group to find out if their interests toward English learning have improved under phonics instruction. All the collected data were analyzed by SPSS11.5.The results showed that after the experiment, the students in the experimental group outperformed the ones in the controlled group in both the vocabulary spelling and reading skills and the language proficiency. Besides, the students in the experimental group also make great progress in improving their interests and motivation in English learning. The majority of them do not think English difficult and dull any more, instead, they become interested and motivated in learning it. Thus, it is proved the effectiveness of phonics in Hui students’ vocabulary teaching in this area.