The Study Of The Effect Of Phonological Awareness Training On The Ability Of Word Spelling And Word Recognition In Primary School

Phonological awareness becomes one of the most important research topics in recent years.A lots of experimental results show that phonological awareness plays an important role in the acquisition and development of children's reading,and it also plays an important role in the word spelling and word recognition.Many western scholars attached great importance to the relationship between phonological awareness and reading or spelling ability,and made fruitful achievements.However,the participants in these phonological awareness research are young English-speaking children.In recent years,more and more Chinese scholars have begun to sum up the research achievements of the western scholars,and explored the relationship between phonological awareness and reading ability.Considering that fact that English teachers from primary school in Tian Zhu county have little knowledge about the definition and the meaning of phonological awareness,that they have not recognized the important role of phonological awareness training in English learning,and that they have never trained students' phonological awareness,the author has read many literature reviews on phonological awareness from abroad and at home,and on the basis of the literature reviews,the author carried out an eight-week experiment on cultivating students' phonological awareness in An Yuan primary school in Tian Zhu county.This research is aimed at exploring the relationship between phonological awareness and the abilities of word spelling and word recognition among primary school students.The author applied the phonological awareness training to English vocabulary teaching for the students in a primary school,which helps the teachers to study whether the training of phonological awareness can really improve students' phonological awareness,as well as their word spelling and word recognition skills.The research methods used in the study are questionnaire,experimental study and interview.This study attempts to answer the following three questions:(1)Does phonological awareness training have effect on students' ability of word spelling at the primary school level?(2)Does phonological awareness training have effect on students' ability of word recognition at the primary school level ?(3)Can phonological awareness training influence students' interest of and attitude to English learning?In this study,44 participants from two fourth-grade classes in An Yuan primary school in Tian Zhu county were involved.The students in the control class accepted the training of the traditional English word spelling and word recognition while the students in the experimental class accepted phonological awareness training by the following three aspects:(a)syllable awareness,(b)onset-rime awareness(c)phoneme awareness.The pretest results revealed no significant differences between the two classes in terms of word spelling,word recognition and phonological awareness.During the experiment,the students from the control class focused on spelling and recognizing words after the teacher or the tape,while the students from the experimental class focused on spelling and recognizing words through phonological awareness training.After the experiment,the post-test results clearly indicated significant differences between the two classes.The performance of the experimental class students in terms of their phonological awareness,and their word spelling and word recognition abilities were all better than that of the control class.The three questions in this study were answered.The main conclusions of this study are presented as follows:1.In the process of foreign language teaching,it is very important to train students' phonological awareness to improve their word spelling ability effectively.2.The cultivation of students' phonological awareness plays an active and important role in students' word recognition.3.The training of phonological awareness can promote students' interest of and attitude to English learning.This study shows that phonological awareness training can not only improve the primary students' word spelling and word recognition,but also enhance the primary students' interest of and attitude to English learning and the primary students' phonological awareness.Meanwhile,some implications of the output of this study can optimize the English vocabulary teaching in primary schools.So the English teachers should use phonological awareness training more often during their teaching in the future,so that the learners can use what they have learned about phonological awareness to learn vocabulary.