| Phonics,a method for teaching English language,has been widely used in European primary education and made a great success,but remains to be in the initial stage in China.Some experiments and studies have been carried out to investigate whether Phonics applies to China,a way which little research explores the relationship between Phonics and phonological awareness.It is even less in case studies on preschool children.As a case study research,this study selected 4 children aged 5 or 6 without any contact with English before and conducted a descriptive research on them in order to find out the impact of Phonics on Chinese preschool children's phonological awareness.This study attempts to answer the following two questions: 1)Does Phonics play a role in development of phonological awareness for Chinese preschool children's? 2)What effects does Phonics have on Chinese preschool children's knowledge of alphabet,phonemic awareness,onset-rime awareness,syllable awareness and short story reading abilities?An eight-week-teaching was carried out to four subjects,with contents of Phonics on alphabet,phoneme,onset-rime,syllable and short story reading.The development of children's phonological awareness was recorded by teaching observing video and teaching journal.Then a test was conducted to examine four subjects' phonological awareness after two-month teaching.The main findings demonstrated that Phonics was positively related to the development of preschool children's phonological awareness.To be specific,significant improvement was observed in knowledge of alphabet,onset-rhyme awareness and phonemic awareness.However,fewer enhancements were found in syllabic awareness or short story reading abilities.The two reasons are as follows: firstly,the alphabet and spelling of phoneme are similar to Pinyin,which makes the acquaintance of the alphabet and spelling relatively easy for the preschool children in China.However,it is relatively difficult to divide and combine syllables according to the vowels for Chinese children.Secondly,it needs a comparatively long time to develop phonological awareness,and then acting it on reading ability.Two months experimental was not long enough to deserve the effect on development of reading ability by using Phonics.Finally,this study makes a discussion on Phonics using in teaching,What's more,suggestions for enhancing preschool children's phonological awareness are offered. |
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