An Empirical Study Of The Impact Of Phonics On The Reading And Writing Of English Vocabulary In Primary Schools

With the deepening of the reform in Senior High School Entrance Examination and National College Entrance Examination in China,English education is encouraged to demand more from students' listening and speaking ability.As the beginning stage of English learning,primary English teaching is worthy of in-depth analysis and reflection as we go forward.Moreover,vocabulary is the base of English learning,but the traditional teaching method of International Phonetic Alphabet fails to build the relationship between letter(s)and sound(s)directly.Consequently,pupils have difficulty in reading and writing words by themselves.Therefore,it is necessary to explore a vocabulary method suitable for primary school students.The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of phonics on the development of pupils' competence in the reading(decoding)and writing(encoding)of English vocabulary.The thesis is to have a tentative study on the impact of phonics on the vocabulary learning in primary schools in terms of three dimensions: reading,writing and phonological awareness.Three questions to be studied are as follows:(1)Does phonics help students to read and write words in English?(2)What stages of development have the children reached at the end of the phonics instruction?(3)What evidence is there that the learners are able to generalize the phonics instruction to the reading and writing of new words?To address these questions,this study conducted an experiment over a period of120 class hours.50 participants were divided into two groups: an experimental group and a control group.The experimental group received phonics training while International Phonetic Alphabet was adopted in the teaching of control group.The experimental process included a pre-questionnaire,a pre-test,a post-test,a post-questionnaire and an interview.Besides,China's Standards of English Language Ability was referred to in the study to evaluate the development of students' language literacy.The results of the research suggest:(1)Phonics can help students to read and write words in English.(2)Students benefited from the phonics teaching and their language using ability in phonetic system and written forms developed from Level 1 to Level 3.(3)Students receiving phonics instruction could generalize the strategies of decoding,encoding and invoking phonological awareness into figuring out unknown words.Therefore,the students were able to generalize the phonics instruction to the reading and writing of new words as phonics helped them to learn English language in a more comprehensive way,explicitly improved students reading,writing and phonological awareness,and implicitly cultivated students interest,motivation,enthusiasm and independence as well.