An Empirical Study On Effect Of Phonological Awareness Training On Spelling Ability Of First-year Students In Rural Junior Middle School

Phonological awareness(PA)has been a research focus in the western linguistic circle since the 1960 s.A lot of western linguists agreed that English phonological awareness played an important role in children’s English word recognition ability.While the researches are more limited in its relationship with English reading.And they mainly focus on native children,there is few study paying attention to the foreign language learners,especially teenagers.The author finds that there are a lot of problems existing in English vocabulary learning in everyday English teaching.Especially for the first year students in the rural junior middle school,some students among them even don’t contact with English at the primary school or show little interest in English learning.These students are afraid of memorizing words.Based on this situation,this study,learning from the research results both abroad and at home,are based on the theory of second language acquisition and language transform theory.And it is to investigate the present situation of first year students’ English phonological awareness in rural junior middle school and discuss the effect of phonological awareness training on vocabulary spelling ability through an empirical research.After that try to explore the appropriate vocabulary memorizing teaching methods for first grade students in rural junior middle school and to improve the effect of vocabulary teaching methods.In this research,Class Six(49)is chosen as experimental class,and Class Seven(51)is chosen as control class.There are 100 subjects in total.The experiment process is divided into three phases: firstly,do the interview and questionnaire survey on both classes respectively to investigate the present situation of first year students’ English phonological awareness in rural junior middle school.During the second phrase,by comparing the data before and after the EC’s and CC’s English phonological awareness tests and words spelling tests,analyzing the correlation data between students’ PA level and words spelling ability,the author can explore the effect of English PA training on first year students’ English words spelling ability in rural junior middle school.At last,do the second interview to understand the students’ perceptions towards the necessity and importance of English PA training so as to provide experiences and references for the first grade students’ vocabulary teaching in rural junior middle school in the future.This research mainly focuses on the following questions: Firstly,to investigate whether the PA training can improve first grade students’ phonological awareness level in rural junior middle school;Secondly,to explore the correction between PA level and their words spelling ability.In this experiment the author adopted both quantitative and qualitative analysis,and used SPSS 19.0 to have descriptive analysis,independent sample t-test,correlation analysis and so on.The results are as follows: First,after systemic phonological awareness training,the experimental class have improved greatly both in PA level and words spelling ability,and they have significant difference with the control class.Secondly,through the correlation analysis between PA level and words spelling ability,it can conclude that phonological awareness level and word spelling ability are positively related.To sum up,the systematic PA training do can improve students’ PA level and words spelling ability.What’s more,the author also put forward some suggestions of English vocabulary learning for students and English vocabulary teaching for teachers at the end of this research,which aims at improve students’ English learning interest and develop their English comprehensive abilities.