| Vocabulary is the foundation of English learning.The abilities of pronouncing and spelling words are essential to vocabulary learning.However,students at high schools have not developed a good habit of pronouncing and spelling words,which,in turn,influences their listening,speaking,reading and writing ability,also their interest and confidence of learning English.As a result,they find it difficult to memorize new words.Phonics and phonetic symbols are two kinds of teaching approaches to improve the abilities of pronouncing and spelling words,but the two approaches both have demerits.The rules of phonics only apply to about 80% of English words.In addition,there are too many rules for students to memorize.The approach of phonetic symbols requires that students memorize a new system of symbols and it neglects the correspondence between letter and sound,causing spelling problems.Meanwhile,students cannot pronounce words without the help of phonetic symbols.Hence,the author attempted to combine the merits of the two teaching approaches to design a training process to improve high school students’ abilities of pronouncing and spelling words.In the teaching process of the research,the author started from teaching letter and letter combinations,and then introduced phonetic symbols according to the letter and letter combinations.The author helped students correct their pronunciation through phonetic symbols.In this way,phonics and phonetic symbols are closely combined.At the same time,the method of syllabification,and the pronunciation of vowel letter and letter combinations in unstressed syllables are also added in teaching so as to improve students’ ability to pronounce and spell multi-syllable words.The last step of the teaching process is affixes,which can help students pronounce and spell words quickly and correctly and judge the stress of words.The author also used a variety of teaching methods,including combined phonics,using the positive transfer of Chinese,using context,constructing vocabulary list,letter and phonetic symbol cards andphonological training.The research questions of the thesis are as follows:(1)Can the teaching of phonics and English phonetic symbols improve high school students’ ability of pronouncing words?(2)Can the teaching of phonics and English phonetic symbols improve high school students’ ability of spelling words?The research methods used in the thesis are teaching experimentation and questionnaire.In the teaching experimentation,the author only experimented on one class.The author did not have a control class for fear that she should treat the students in control class unfairly.The extent of the increase of students’ scores in pre-test and post-test can prove the effectiveness of the teaching of phonics and English phonetic symbols.The author tested 30 students of Class Three,Grade One in No.1 High School Affiliated to East China Normal University in Shanghai,using the pre-test and post-test.Through paired sample T-test,the author found that the scores between pre-test and post-test have significant differences and the mean score increased by more than 10 points,which indicates that the teaching process is effective in improving the students’ abilities of pronouncing and spelling words.Through the questionnaire,the author investigated the 30 students to find out how they use phonics and phonetic symbols.The result shows that students’ ability of using phonics is worse than their ability of using phonetic symbols,and 36.7 percent of the students need instruction on their study of English phonetic symbols.The main conclusion of the thesis is that the teaching process and the teaching methods in the thesis is helpful to improve students’ abilities of pronouncing and spelling words as well as students’ interest and confidence in English learning. |
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