A Research On The Application Of Phonics Method To English Teaching At Rural Primary School

The National English Curriculum Standard in 2011 makes requirements for students who can meet the standards of the second level that they are supposed to have a good command of about 600-700 words and read easy words by the spelling rules.But how to help students to meet the standards above is not easy.According to the teaching process advocated by the textbook of Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press,students learn new vocabularies by beginning with letter,and then to the word phonetics,which breaks the connection of pronunciation,form and meaning,especially the relation of word sound and spelling is cut.Therefore,many students encounter problems that they cannot read or spell correctly.Considering the nowadays fact of English teaching in rural primary school,the author selected phonics method as research object and apply it in an English class of grade 4 in a rural primary school.The experiment,by applying the Piaget's theory of Children's Cognitive Development,critical period hypothesis and language transfer theory and combining with the three teaching methods of phonics proposed by Cunningham,is aiming at figuring out whether phonics can improve primary students' abilities of word pronunciation and word spelling,which contribute to their language proficiency.The research questions include the following two aspects:(1)Whether the experimental class achieves the expected effect by pre-test and post-test at rural primary school?(2)What problems appeared in the process of using phonics method?The author selected 45 primary school students from grade 4 as the subjects of this experiment at the rural primary school.Class 2 was the experimental class for phonics which is taught by the author herself.Experiment time: February--July 2015.In theexperiment,three experimental tools were used: test,classroom observation and interview.The test was divided into four parts-examined the students' phonological awareness,spelling and reading ability,language proficiency.Classroom observations record students' acceptance and performance in the classroom.The interview was conducted to investigate what difficulties students encountered during the course of phonics training,hoping to seek feedback.After four months of training and a large amount of data analysis,the following major findings were drawn:(1)The experimental class is better than before for the phonological awareness,spelling & reading ability and language proficiency.This shows that the experiment has achieved the desired effect.Compared with the results of the pre-test,the post-test scores of the male and female students in the experimental class have been significantly improved,but the girls have higher scores than the boys.In the classroom observation,it has been found those students who have strong accepted ability and active learning attitudes are more likely to master and apply the phonics.(2)Students in the experimental class have difficulties in the letter-sound relationship and laws,and there is a phenomenon that they just spell the word but don't know the meaning in the process of practical application.Chinese Pinyin has a positive effect on the teaching of phonics,and it also has negative transfer.Through analysis,we can see:(1)Phonics method can stimulate rural primary students' interest and improve their ability in learning English.It is worth popularizing at rural primary schools.(2)In the process of using phonics method,boys and girls can develop cooperative learning to narrow the gap.Teachers should help them use multiple strategies to strengthen the memory of the letter-sound relationship,enhance the semantic understanding through situational teaching,avoid negative transfer of Chinese Pinyin and consolidate it in various reading materials so as to improve the quality of English teaching better at rural primary schools.