An Action Study On Phonics Instruction To High School Students With English Learning Difficulties

At present,despite the vocabulary classes offered in senior high schools in China,many senior students still have difficulties in pronouncing or spelling words,especially for those whose English are very weak and poor.The separation of sound,form and meaning is a biggest problem for those students with learning difficulties in current senior high school.So being an English teacher in a senior high school,the author attempted to use phonics method to help her students.For the senior high school students,phonics as a method to help them establish letter-sound correspondence may be a method which sounds like "mend the fold after the sheep have been stolen".However,it is never late for English learners to obtain the knowledge of letter-sound consciousness,since most of the students just lack this kind of letter-sound corresponding consciousness.Therefore,this paper is concerned with an action research on the students with learning difficulties in senior high school.Based on the constructivism and language transfer theory,from the perspective of phonological awareness,word spelling ability,and word pronunciation ability,this paper is aimed to answer the following questions:(1)whether phonics instruction contributes to the development of phonological awareness in English for the senior high school students with learning difficulties? If yes,to what extent does phonics instruction do assistance?(2)Whether phonics instruction is an effective method to improve the pronunciation ability for students with learning difficulties? If yes,to what extent does phonics instruction do assistance?(3)Whether phonics instruction is an effective method to improve the spelling ability for students with learning difficulties? If yes,to what extent does phonics instruction do assistance?52 subjects were chosen from the author's own class,in which most of the students' mean scores in regular examinations were not more than 90 points(total score:150).A questionnaire,an interview and some tests of phonological awareness,word spelling ability,and word pronunciation ability were carried out respectively before the phonics instruction.And then the phonics instruction with lots of practice was implemented to teach the students the spelling rules of phonics.After the phonics instruction,the subjects were required to do a post-questionnaire,a post-interview and post-tests again to provide statistic data for this research.The statistic data of this research shows that phonics does help those senior high school students with learning difficulties improve their English,and it can help them get out of the trouble in learning English to some extent.First,phonics is conducive to their development of phonological awareness.It can be seen from the post-test that the highest score,the lowest score and the mean score of PA post-test are all higher than those of the PA pre-test.Especially,the mean score of PA test for the subjects increases about16 points.And the percentage of the students who get a score more than 60 points has been increased from 40% to 68%.Second,phonics instruction can improve the ability of word pronunciation for the senior high school students with learning difficulties.The subjects got a mean of 72 points in the post-test,which was 16 points higher than that of pre-test.Besides,phonics trained the students to establish corresponding relationships between letters or letter combinations and their pronunciations,which can make the students read unknown words without the aid of phonetic symbols.Third,phonics training can improve their word spelling ability.It is found that the maximum,minimum,mean score,and the number and percentage in each grade in pre-test are all increased in post-test.The subjects get a mean score of 28 points before receiving phonics instruction while get a mean score of 44 points after receiving phonics instruction.Moreover,the teaching content and the teaching strategies that the author adopted in the research on phonics instruction to senior high school students can be a beneficial attempt for the phonics on senior high school English teaching.And it is instructive for the adults' English learners whose English learning effect is poor.