An Experimental Study On The Effectiveness Of Phonics Instruction On Primary School Pupils' English Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary is the very essence of the process of learning a new language,especially for foreign language learners.Over the years,both English teachers and students have made great effort to find some effective methods to learn English words but they still face many difficulties in English vocabulary teaching and learning.Most of the students can not pronounce the words accurately and they can not memorize the spelling of the words as well.In order to explore a more effective vocabulary learning strategy,phonics was introduced to the EFL(English as a foreign language)teaching in China.Phonics is a system of letter-sound relationships which is corresponding to the nature of English as an alphabetic language.The effectiveness of phonics on children's language learning has been proved in western countries.This study tried to apply phonics in the English vocabulary teaching and learning to investigate the effectiveness of phonics instruction on primary school pupils' vocabulary acquisition by experimental study.The EC(experimental class,N=30)and the CC(control class,N=30)were chosen from Grade Six in the Third Primary School of Wenquan Town,Conghua District,Guangzhou City.Phonics instruction was implemented and applied to the vocabulary teaching of the EC while the participants of the EC learned the vocabulary by traditional methods as before.The effectiveness of phonics on pupils' vocabulary acquisition will be examined by the data gained from vocabulary acquisition test,alphabetic recognition test,phonemic awareness test and vocabulary autonomous learning ability questionnaire.And the correlation between alphabetic recognition,phonemic awareness and vocabulary acquisition will be figured out too.The research questions are: 1)Is phonics instruction effective on the students' vocabulary acquisition?2)What's the correlation between alphabet recognition,phonemic awareness and acquisition vocabulary respectively?The results show that phonics instruction is effective on primary school pupils' vocabulary acquisition.Meanwhile,phonics learning is beneficial for the development of pupils' alphabetic recognition and phonemic awareness.As it has been proved that there is a positive correlation between alphabetic recognition,phonemic awareness and vocabulary acquisition respectively through the Correlation Test.The advancement of pupils' alphabeticrecognition and phonemic awareness phonics can promote their vocabulary acquisition.What's more,phonics learning can improve students' vocabulary autonomous learning ability which provide them a way to learn words by themselves.In light of the limitations of the study such as short experiment time,the deficiency of the test,the lack of reading materials and so on,some suggestions are proposed as follows: 1)The duration time of the experiment should be lengthened;2)Teachers should add numerous decodable reading materials as a supplement;3)Other aspects of vocabulary acquisition such as the usage,collocation are advised to be included in further studies.