A Study On The Practice Of Phonics In English Vocabulary Teaching For The Primary School Students

English is an alphabetic language system with the consistence between sounds and letters. In daily vocabulary teaching, most English teachers neglect the internal relationship between sounds and letters, which prevents pupils from spelling, reading and memorizing English words successfully. The division of sound, form and meaning is a problem in current English teaching of primary schools. Phonics method establishes the correspondent relationship between letters or letter combinations and the form of words, which improves students’ English learning, that is, as soon as they see words, they can sound them out, and as soon as they hear words, they can write them down. Phonics method has a long history in Western countries, which has been proved to be effective in language learning and teaching for English native young children. Recently, more and more Chinese scholars and teachers pay more attention to this teaching method.The author applied the phonics method to English vocabulary teaching for the higher-grade pupils in a primary school, which helps the teachers to study whether phonics could really improve students’ phonological awareness, word spelling and reading skill. The research methods used in the study include questionnaire, experimental study and test. The subjects of the study are from a foreign language school in Suzhou. The research questions are addressed as follows:(1) Can phonics method improve higher-grade pupils’ English phonological awareness, word reading and spelling ability in primary schools? If yes, to what extent?(2) Can phonics method stimulate the pupils’ interest in learning English vocabulary? If yes, to what extent?After the very careful study, the major findings of the study are summarized as follows:Firstly, Phonics method can not only improve students’ phonological awareness, but also students’ English word spelling and reading ability. The students in the experimental group set up a correspondent relationship, after the practice of pronunciation through a lot of letters and letter combinations. Then they change the pronunciation into letters and letter combinations. They memorize the pronunciation from sound to form, and in turn.Secondly, most of the pupils have showed their keen interests in the phonics method and prefer to learn new words’ pronunciation and spelling by using the phonics method. Most of the students prefer to read the new words according to the rules of the pronunciation of the letters or letter combinations. They prefer to memorize words by using the phonics method.Based on the findings of the study, some pedagogical implications of the study could optimize the English vocabulary teaching in primary schools. And the teachers could use more about phonics method during the teaching in the future, the learners could learn more knowledge about it.