An Empirical Study On The Improvement Of Pupils' Ability Of Word Reading And Spelling With Phonics

Nowadays,more and more people pay more attention to English learning,especially for pupils in primary schools.Primary schools in rural areas in China have started to establish English classes for Grade Three students.However,students who study English vocabulary mainly by rote memorization,or sometimes,even have to mark Chinese pinyin above the words,fail to have a professional method to study efficiently.On the other hand,they have many difficulties to remember vocabulary,although they spend much time in practicing.So gradually students get tired of learning English and lose English learning interest.Considering this situation,the author adopted a very popular and an effective way to teach English vocabulary,which aims to help students “see to read,listen to write” by studying the connections between letters and pronunciation.The thesis will answer the follow questions:Question 1: Whether phonics can improve the interest of English learning or not.Question 2: Will phonics improve the ability of word reading ?Question 3: Will phonics improve the ability to word spelling ?Based on the behaviorism,constructivism and language transfer,a 15-week experiment was conducted to answer the three research questions.Seventy-eight participants from Da Hebei County,the city of Lingyuan,Liaoning Province were involved in the experiment,in which phonics teaching was carried out in the Experiment Class(EC),whereas the Control Class(CC)was still taught by the traditional approach.Simultaneously,some tests with a questionnaire was used to collect experiment data analyzed by SPSS.The results showed that pupils in the EC did better in vocabulary post-test which manifested stronger learning interest than those in the CC,in which it proves that the phonics teaching in the study was more effective than the traditional approach in vocabulary learning.A conclusion is thus made that first phonics teaching is feasible and effective.Secondly,phonics teaching can not only enable students to learn English words effectively,but improve their English learning interest which is the best teacher in English learning.