An Intervention Study Of Chinesespeaking Children's English Phonological Awareness And English Reading Through Phonics Instruction

Phonological awareness is the ability to perform cognitive processing on phonetic representations.Studies have shown that phonological awareness is an important metalinguistic factor affecting children's literacy development(Adams,1990;Ogino et al.,2017),and thereby has attracted widespread attention from foreign researchers.However,in the face of numerous researches on the impact of phonological awareness on reading,there are relatively few experimental studies on the acquisition and development of Chinese children's English phonological awareness.Therefore,this study adopts a 2×2 experimental research method,using the phonics instruction as the experimental training method to explore the acquisition characteristics of pupils' English phonological awareness,and to reveal the indirect influence of phonics on English reading.The main issues to be addressed in this study are as follows:(1)Can different aspects of English phonological awareness be improved by learning phonics?(2)Does the improvement of English phonological awareness improve the English reading ability of primary school students?(3)What effects does English phonological awareness have on pupils' English reading ability?The subjects of this experiment are 60 students in the fourth grade,who are randomly divided into two groups(30 in the control group and 30 in the experimental group).Before the formal experiment,both groups receive the Raven test,general English ability test,English phonological awareness test,and English reading test to ensure that there is no difference between the two groups in those abilities.During the intervention experiment,each subject in the experimental group accepts twelve weeks of phonics learning in the form of one-to-thirty learning at school with phonetic spelling task.The control group only accepts daily English studies at school.The learning frequency of phonics learning is 20 minutes each time,three times a week.After the experiment,two groups immediately conduct English phonological awareness and English reading tests to detect differences and correlations.The results demonstrate that:(1)Pupils' overall English phonological awareness can be improved by phonics instruction,but there are differences in different types of pupils' English phonological awareness after phonics training.(2)The improvement of English phonological awareness will strengthen elementary school students' English reading ability,and has a certain predictive effect.The above research findings demonstrate that pupils' English phonological awareness can promote their English reading ability,and phonological awareness can be improved through phonics instruction.However,it should be noted that there are differences among the three types of English phonological awareness.Syllabic awareness is not easily affected by phonics training but requires additional and targeted training.Research also shows that the effects of different kinds of phonological awareness on different types of reading are different.Therefore,the training of phonological awareness needs to take into account the different types of phonetics and be comprehensive.Meanwhile,it is necessary to make targeted adjustments according to the types of reading.Especially with the improvement of academic requirements for passage reading ability,it is particularly vital to strengthen the training of syllabic awareness.