A Survey Study On High School Students' Phonological Awareness And Spelling Ability

Closely connected with people's reading and spelling ability,phonological awareness,which belongs to the sound level of words,has aroused extensive attention and becomes a hot topic in western psychological and linguistic field since the 1970s.Phonological awareness is generally regarded as the internalization of certain explicit speech knowledge that words consist of syllables,onset-rimes,and phonemes on phonological level,which can be activated in language processing when necessary.Massive previous studies mainly focused on the three aspects:the developmental order of phonological awareness,the effectiveness of its training to improve word spelling,the correlations between phonological and reading or spelling ability.This study mainly covers two aspects.One aspect is to explore the effects of different grades and genders on the phonological awareness and spelling ability respectively.The other is to take phonological awareness as the independent variable,and to explore the correlations between the awareness and word spelling ability.To fill the gaps of previous studies,larger samples,modified instruments and different perspectives are employed.Concretely,the current investigation intends to address the following research questions:(1)Whether the different grades and genders have any significant effects on Chinese high school students' phonological awareness?(2)Whether the different grades and genders have any significant effects on Chinese high school students' word spelling ability?(3)Whether the levels of Chinese high school students' phonological awareness have any significant effects on their word spelling ability when taking phonological awareness as the independent variable?Quantitative and qualitative research methods are conducted,and the major findings are as follows:Firstly,the data reports prove that different grades have a significant effect on high school students' phonological awareness.With the increase of grades and ages,the scores of participants' three phonological tasks rise significantly.With respect to the genders,boys and girls do not have significant differences in the performance of phonemic awareness and rhyming awareness tasks,but girls significantly outperform boys in syllable awareness and the total scores of phonological awareness.That is to say,in general,girls have slightly better phonological awareness than boys.However,the interactive effect produced by grades and genders together on the phonological awareness is not significant.Secondly,grades have a significantly affect on spelling ability.The results show that the scores of high school students' word spelling tasks improve obviously along with the increase of their grades.Furthermore,girls' performance in word spelling task is significantly better than that of boys.However,when considering the interactive effect produced by grades and genders on the spelling task,there is no significance.Thirdly,the phonological awareness significantly affects the spelling ability.The results of correlations prove that the phonological awareness is positively correlated with word spelling.Besides,the qualitative questionnaires reveal that most students have realize the importance of using phonological skills in memorizing words.Specifically,the phonemic awareness in identifying the middle and ending sound,as well as rhyming awareness in segmenting words into onset-rimes are both significantly correlated with spelling relatively simple words containing blends of consonants and vowels.Yet in spelling more difficult and prolonged words with the linguistic units of syllable or other harder suffixes and roots,the syllable awareness tasks in segmenting the long words into syllables and correctly judging the stressed syllable in speech are significantly correlated with the performance of word spelling.For pedagogical implications,it is necessary for us to realize that in spelling words of different structures and lengths,different kinds of abilities and phonological factors are called for to meet the spelling task.Additionally,weak comprehension in listening and reading as well as the lack of phonological awareness can result in the deficiency of word memorization.Hence,in order to improve spelling performance,an efficient way is to cultivate the phonological awareness by creating enough exposure to the target language and to give proper instructions when necessary.