The Application Of Phonics To English Vocabulary Teaching In Upper-grade Primary School Students

Vocabulary teaching plays an important role in English teaching,It has great challenge for learners to memorize words especially for upper-grade primary school students.Most of the English teachers use the traditional teaching method.They only focus on the meaning and usage of a word but ignore the importance of helping students remember new words effectively.They just drill students simply and mechanically,it’s easy to make students become tired and bored.It is necessary to provide students an effective method of vocabulary learning in order to help them grasp the vocabulary.The Phonics first appeared in the American reading teaching in the 1890s,The key point of phonics method is to build the corresponding relationship between English letters,letter patterns and sound,students use the positive transfer of Chinese Pinyin to grasp the corresponding relationship between pronunciation of words and English letters or letters combination.After a period of gradual and specific training,students can form an ability that they can read the words by seeing the words and spell the words by listening to them.Phonics is a method of teaching that can take into account the "pronunciation"、"spelling" and "reading" of words.This paper has two objectives:① to understand the feasibility and effect of phonics teaching in primary English word teaching;②To explore the specific implementation strategies of phonics teaching in word teaching so as to enrich the practice of English teaching in primary schools.In view of this,the writer used phonics method to teach students of the fifth-grade in primary school.The subjects of the study were two classes from the fifth grade of Maoci Primary School in Lanzhou where I had been teaching.This experiment lasted for a semester,the experiment contents mainly included:1)The first step:Letters or letter combination of pronunciation teaching(1-7 weeks)2)The second step:word reading teaching(8-13 weeks)3)The third step:word spelling teaching(I4-16weeks).The experimental process included:Pretest,the teaching experiment,post-test.questionnaire,interview.The writer had the comparative analysis of the two aspects"pronunciation" and "spelling" of the words in the two classes at the end of the semester,the test results showed that the "phonics teaching method" could improve students’ English vocabulary learning ability.The analysis of the questionnaire and the result of the interview with two students in experimental class showed that they were more interested in English learning.They would like to participate in English spelling more actively.Therefore,this study concluded that the phonics teaching method was effective in primary school English vocabulary teaching.It enabled students to recognize the correspondence relationship between letters or letter combinations and pronunciation,to lighten the burden of memorizing words,to raise their interest in learning English.