A Study Of The Effects Of Phonological Awareness Training On English Reading Ability Among Junior High School EFL Learners

In western countries,phonological awareness(PA)has been the main focus of interest in the majority of research reports in the domain of psycholinguistics in the past three decades.And a large amount of studies have shown that phonological awareness training is essential in English teaching,especially in elementary school.However,only a few studies on phonological awareness were conducted among EFL learners,especially among Chinese middle school students,mainly focusing on the relationship between phonological awareness and reading and vocabulary learning.Thus,the present research sets out to investigate the impact of a 8-week phonological awareness training on English phonological awareness and reading ability among Chinese junior high school students.The research focus on three research questions:(1)Can phonological awareness be enhanced through training among EFL middle school learners?(2)What are the relationships between phonological awareness and students’ reading performance?(3)In what aspects does phonological awareness training affect students’ English reading? In order to answer the three questions,62 students were assigned to receive the instruction on phonological awareness skills or comparison instruction which has no direct instruction in phonological awareness skills.A questionnaire was carried out before the training to get some basic background information about students’ English learning.Also,they were tested on phonological awareness at the syllable,rhyme and phoneme levels and English reading ability before and after the program implementation.The phonological awareness training program in this research was mainly divided into two parts.The first part was the basic phonetic knowledge,such as International Phonetic Alphabet(IPA)and sound–letter correspondences;the second part was phonological awareness training including syllable awareness training,onset-rime awareness training and phoneme training.The results indicated that middle school students’ phonological awareness had strong correlation with their English reading ability and students who received the phonological awareness training performed significantly better than the controlled group on phonological awareness at all levels and English reading ability on the post-test when the pretest scores were controlled statistically.The findings suggest that phonological awareness training might be beneficial for middle school students learning English as a second language.