On Applying Phonics To Lower-grade Pupils’ After-School Vocabulary Tutoring Program

In the English curriculum standard(2011 edition),the skills of listening,speaking,reading and writing are precisely defined.As a secondary goal,the cultivation of students’ spelling ability is put forward clearly:it requires that students can read aloud the words that they have learned,understand simple spelling rules,and read simple unfamiliar words according to the spelling rules.In addition,the purpose of the English course in primary school is to stimulate students’ interest in English learning and to build up their confidence.At present,the widely used method of vocabulary teaching is just simple imitation from teachers or videos,without any systematic teaching of phonetics.The students always have a feeling of novelty and are active in class when they first encounter English.But after a period of time,memorizing vocabulary becomes more and more difficult and some of the students lose interest and confidence in English learning.In this paper,we try to explore an effective way of teaching English words to early years students,so the students can master the rules of spelling,remember the words easily,and thus enhance their self-confidence and raise their interest in English learning.The method of phonics can enable students to master grapheme-phoneme correspondence,improve the efficiency of memorization of words,cultivate student’s phoneme awareness,and stimulate students’ interest in English learning.Based on this,the theory of phonics can enrich English teaching theory,and the teaching practice can provide a guide to future English teaching.Secondly,in view of the developmental characteristics of primary school students of different ages,a series of dynamic assessment methods are designed referring to the research results abroad which can be adopted by other teachers and practitioners.The method of empirical study was adopted in this experiment.The differences in students’ phoneme awareness,learning ability and learning interests before and after the application of phonics were compared through measuring instruments:pre-test,post-test,questionnaire and interview.Twelve grade-two primary school students in the author’s after-school club were chosen as subjects,and the study lasted for 20 weeks.The research questions are addressed as below:1,Can phonics approach improve the participants’ phoneme awareness?2,Can phonics approach improve the participants’ reading and spelling ability3,Can phonics approach boost the students’ interest in English learning and help build up their confidence?The results are addressed as follow through careful analysis of the participants’data of the phoneme awareness,reading and spelling ability combing with the data of questionnaire and interview.Firstly,phonics approach enables the participants to establish Grapheme-Phoneme correspondence and improve their phoneme awareness,after the practice of pronunciation through large quantity of letters and letters combination.Secondly,the participants’ ability of reading and spelling is significantly improved after the establishment of phoneme awareness as they can memorize words from sound to form and in turn.Thirdly,most of the participants are willing to use phonics approach to read and spell,and their interests are highly stimulated and their confidence in English learning are greatly enhanced.Therefore,the results of this study show that the phonics approach is an effective strategy for English learning for lower-grade students in primary school.