An Empirical Study On The Application Of Phonics To The English Vocabulary Teaching In Primary School

National English Curriculum Standards was modified by the elementary education research center of National Education Ministry in 2011. It elaborates the course target and emphasizes that English learning should cultivate students’ the initial comprehensive language ability and promote students’ psychological development and improve their comprehensive humanistic literacy. It specifically elaborates the teaching objectives,especially about the language knowledge. It is required that students of lower grade in primary school could read and write 26 letters rightly, have a better understanding of simple spelling rules, realize that they should study the vocabulary based on the word sound, shape and meaning. The core of phonics is to foster the corresponding relationships between English letters(letter combination) and their sounds. Phonics is an English teaching method that focuses on the pronunciation, spelling and reading. It is payed much attention to by more and more scholars and rural teachers now. Pupils’ ability of abstract thinking is weak so they remember vocabulary mainly by rote. If teaching contents are boring, students cannot concentrate on the knowledge and easy to become lazy, as a result, the effect of teaching is influenced seriously. Considering this situation, the author applied phonics to teach the fifth grade pupils in English class so that they can master the letter( letter combinations) sound correspondence then make use of this regulation to learn English as well as increasing their interest.This empirical study uses the pre-test and post-test to analyze the different effects between phonics and traditional vocabulary teaching method. The subjects included 78 students of the fifth grade who come from a primary school in Tuzuo county. The author regarded two parallel classes as the experimental group and control group. The whole process of study lasted a semester. The results of pretest and post-test received from PA test, wordreading and spelling test presented the following findings: Firstly, EG students who accepted phonics training benefit more than CG students,especially those who possess phonics skills can read words more exactly and fluently than those who are short of phonics knowledge. Secondly, after training, EG students can spell the learned words or unfamiliar words easily and smoothly while CG students can’t spell the words accurately. Thirdly,after phonics training, EG students have much stronger phonological awareness than CG students. The study gave future teaching the following revelations: As for the lower grade English vocabulary teaching, teachers should neither blindly instill too much language knowledge to students to make them feel stressful nor apply the traditional vocabulary teaching method just for increasing students’ interest. The teacher should apply to the students’ psychological and cognitive development, make use of phonics cleverly to carry out vocabulary teaching in case for increasing students’ study scores,decreasing their pressure, meeting students’ pursue for knowledge and cultivating the ability of exploring English learning rules.