An Empirical Study On The Application Of Phonics Instruction In The Cultivation Of English Phonological Awareness Of Primary School Students

This thesis is an empirical study on the application of phonics instruction in the cultivation of English phonological awareness of primary school students.Phonics aims to help students to decode words by establishing the letter-sound correspondence.A lot of researches have proved that the phonics instruction can enhance the students,phonological awareness.However,most of the subjects are English beginners without phonetic information.While the subjects the author chooses are students in Grade 6,who have had phonetic information.Based on the Development Model of Phonological Awareness theory and transfer of phonological awareness theory,this thesis is to make a tentative study on the effects of phonics on primary school students,phonological awareness in terms of three dimensions:phoneme awareness,onset-rime awareness,syllable awareness.Three questions will be discussed:l)What is the effect of phonics on primary school students*phoneme awareness?2)What is the effect of phonics on primary school students' onset-rime awareness?3)What is the effect of phonics on primary school students' syllable awareness?In order to answer the above questions,the author chose 120 primary school students in Grade 6 as the experimental subjects.They were divided into 2 groups,60 for each group.Then the author gave a 16-week phonics training to the experimental group while the controlled group was not received phonics instruction.Before the experiment,each group was given a pretest to identify their the English level.After tihe experiment,a post-test and a post-questionnaire were conducted in the two groups to find out if their phonological awareness was enhanced.All the collected data were analyzed by software SPSS22.0.Through data analysis,the major findings are concluded as follows:(1)Most EC students are satisfied with this teaching method.Their learning interest has been enhanced.(2)EC students' overall phonological awareness performance has a significant improvement compared with that of CC students.It can be proved by EC students,significant improvement in their performance of phoneme awareness,onset-rime awareness and syllable awareness;especially in the performance of onset-rime awareness.The experiment indicates that phonics instruction helps to cultivate students' phonological awareness.However,due to restrictions of author's theoretical competence and some other reasons,this experiment inevitably has some limitations.Further study on this teaching method should still be continued.Finally,some useful suggestions for phonetic teaching are put forward.