An Empirical Study Of Phonics Teaching Assisted By Mobile Learning Software At Junior Middle School

With the increasing popularity of smart phones and mobile networks,mobile learning has been applied to English teaching in classrooms and extracurricular learning.Mobile learning is a new learning method that utilizes wireless communication networks and mobile electronic equipment to access educational resources and services anytime and anywhere.Mobile learning expands the learning space and time.It forms a useful complement to traditional classroom teaching and is considered as an indispensable learning mode for future learning.As a new type of teaching method,phonics abandons the way of memorizing words mechanically.It improves students' abilities of reading and spelling words by establishing the rules between letters or letter combinations and their corresponding sounds.It makes the memorization of words simple and interesting.Compared with the traditional teaching method,phonics can enable students read it out at the sight of a word and spell it out when hear its sound.This study combines mobile learning with phonics.To be more specific,phonics teaching is assisted by mobile learning software.The phonics rules are taught during the first ten minutes of every English class in order not to affect the normal English teaching progress and teaching plan at junior middle school.Meanwhile,some mobile learning software are also used to preview,review and practice these rules to make up for the insufficient teaching time and the lack of practice in class.Students would have a better mastery of phonics knowledge and put it into actual vocabulary reading and spelling.This study adopts the methodologies of the teaching experiment,questionnaires survey as well as pre-tests and post-tests.Two classes of Grade Seven at junior middle school have been chosen as experimental subjects to conduct a twelve-week teaching experiment.The experimental class has adopted phonics teaching assisted by mobile software to teach vocabulary;the control class has followed the traditional vocabularyteaching method.Through the integration of mobile learning software and phonics,this study attempts to explore how phonics can play a more active role in English teaching and to realize the mode of overall classroom teaching and extracurricular English learning at junior middle school.The findings of this study indicate that vocabulary reading,spelling abilities and English learning interest of students in the experimental class are significantly enhanced after the experiment.As a suggestion,it would be much better if teachers utilize phonics and mobile learning appropriately and create a dynamic teaching mode to improve students' English proficiency and interest in English learning.