An Experimental Study On Applying Phonics To Enhance Low-grade Students' Word Spelling And Pronunciation Ability In Primary School

For English learners,knowing how to pronounce and spell a word is the threshold.It is a big problem for primary school students to pronounce and spell because they don't know the letter-sound correspondence.The key point of phonics approach is to build the corresponding relationship between English letters,letter patterns and sound.Phonics is an English teaching approach which has the functions of teaching pronunciation,spelling simultaneously.This approach is very popular in English speaking countries.There are more and more scholars and teachers who pay more attention to this approach in China.In view of this,the author intends to use phonics approach to teach primary school students of the third-grade and the forth-grade with the purpose of facilitating them to recognize the corresponding relationship between letters or letter combinations and phonemes,and then raise their interest and confidence in learning English.The research questions are summarized as follows:Question 1: Can phonics improve students' word spelling ability?Question 2: Can phonics improve students' word pronunciation ability?Question3: Can phonics enhance students' interest and confidence in words spelling and pronunciation?Experimental approach is employed in this study.The subjects of the study were 40 students from the third and the forth Grade of Tongwei No.1 Experimental Primary school in Dingxi.20 students are in Experimental group and 20 students in the control group.The research lasted for six weeks.The phonics is used in the experimental group which follows the process of the introduction of the spelling rules and teaching students according to the textbook with the phonics approach.In Control group the author international phonetic alphabets as the main content.The experimental procedure goes in four steps: The first step,questionnaires are handed out to students to investigate their word spelling habits and difficulties,as well as the learning experience of international phonetic alphabet.The second step is the teaching process,in which the specific teaching process of experimental group and control group in six weeks are described respectively.The third step is testing,through the letters-pronunciation corresponding test,dictation test and pronunciation test to test the effectiveness of the phonics approach.The fourth step is interview,through the interview on experimental group students,we are expecting to see if the phonics approach could improve their confidence and interest of word spelling.Based on the comparison of the test results between experimental group and control group,we find the ability of the letters-pronunciation corresponding in the experimental group spelling accuracy and pronunciation accuracy are significantly higher than that of control group.Interviews with different levels of the students,in experimental group show that they are more confident and more interested in English word spelling.Therefore,the conclusion can be drawn that the phonics approach is effective in primary school English teaching.