An Experimental Study On The Application Of Phonics To English Vocabulary Teaching In Grade Three Primary Schools

With the acceleration of globalization,English learning has received more and more attention.In China,as an important part of English teaching,vocabulary teaching still has many difficulties.Most teachers adopt traditional teaching methods.In addition,the lack of an English learning environment makes some Chinese students fear to memorize a large number of vocabulary and generally lose interest in vocabulary learning.Therefore,it is necessary to provide new methods for English vocabulary teaching.The core of phonics is to establish correspondence between letters or combinations of letters and pronunciations.This teaching method has achieved a good teaching effect in Britain and United States,as well as Canada and has attracted more and more attention from domestic scholars and English teachers.They applied the rules of spelling to vocabulary learning,thus increasing students’ interest in English learning and improving the effect of vocabulary teaching.Based on the theory of language transfer and the theory of constructivism,this paper conducts an experimental study in two parallel classes of Grade Three in Cheng De Minority Primary School(50 students in each class,and the ratio of male and female is equal),aiming to investigate two questions:(1)What is the effect of phonics on Grade Three primary school students’ word spelling ability?(2)What is the effect of phonics on Grade Three primary school students’ word reading ability.For the experimental group(EG),they got phonics training,while participants in the control group(CG)were taught in traditional vocabulary teaching methods.SPSS 22.0 was used for statistical analysis based on the results of word spelling and spelling tests in the experimental group and the control group.Specifically,the independent sample T-test is used to compare the students’ word spelling ability and reading ability between the EG and the CG between the experimental group and the control group.Paired sample T-test was used to compare the change of word reading ability and spelling ability within the experimental group or the control group.Based on the quantitative data and the qualitative analysis from four tests and two questionnaires,the experimental results show that: In the pretest,the average scores of word spelling and reading of the students in the experimental group and the control group are almost the same.After a semester of phonics teaching,the average score and progress of the experimental group and the control group were significantly different.In the post-test,the average score and improvement range of word reading and spelling in the experimental group were significantly higher than those in the control group.At the same time in the test before and after the comparison of the experimental group of words,reading and spelling of the average score has significantly improved.On the contrary,there was no significant improvement in the control group.This proves that phonics does improve students’ ability to read and spell words.The data from the questionnaire shows that most students think the difficulty in English learning is vocabulary and have not learned phonics.Questionnaires before and after the comparison show that compared with the traditional vocabulary teaching methods,phonics can stimulate students’ interest in learning English to some extent and enhance their confidence in learning English well.