The Application Of Phonics In English Teaching In Rural Primary School

Based on the sounds of the 26 alphabetic letters,phonics enables learners to read by combining the five vowel letters with the consonant preceding them.Guided by a sound-dominated phonics,students will be able to read a word they've never even met before.As phonics centers on sound-symbol correspondences,it enables students to read out words by sight,thus helping them overcome their problems with pronunciation and vocabulary spelling.Primary school students in rural areas of Xinjiang start learning English only from the third grade on,a time when they barely know anything about the English language itself,not to mention previous training or learning in this respect.English pronunciation and spelling are even more demanding challenges for them to master with great precision.However,as high English proficiency builds on phonology and spelling,the introduction of Phonics-based methods in English teaching can not only make it easier for students to learn English but can also exert a positive influence on the learning process of English for children in rural areas.As to how to help students make rapid progress with their pronunciation and spelling,phonics works well to achieve that goal.By applying phonics to the teaching of the fourth-graders in Wutu Bulake Primary School,Dongmaili Village,Gongliu County,where the author taught,this thesis is intended to find out if phonics can improve primary school students' pronunciation,their spelling skills and their ability to apply the English language in real life situations.This study,based on the Zone of proximal development,cognitive development theory,and cognitive structure migration theory,explores the effective role phonics plays in promoting English teaching in primary schools.This study mainly uses the methods of the questionnaire survey and the teaching experiment.The experiment subjects for the Experimental Group(23)and for the Control Group(23)were students from the two classes the author taught – Class One and Class Two.Before the study began,both classes took a pre-test to make sure they were at the same level in terms of phonology and English spelling.While one class was trained with Phonics the other was taught in traditional ways.After 12 weeks,the two classes were required to take a post-test and questionnaire,the data of which was analyzed via SPSS19.The conclusions are as follows: Phonics can not only raise students' phonological awareness but also help improve their spelling and memory skills.With the increased phonological awareness brought by the implementation of phonics,students will have a greater grasp of English pronunciation.The above test results hold far-reaching implications for English teaching in primary schools.Based on the findings of the study the author has ventured some suggestions on teaching English in the future.It is the author's wish that Phonics could be applied more widely and more systematically to rural primary English teaching,and meanwhile students in these areas could acquire more knowledge concerned with spelling and phonology.