A Study On The Application Of Phonics To English Vocabulary Teaching In Rural Primary School

English vocabulary teaching is regarded as an important component in the process of English teaching.However,most English teachers in rural primary school often ignore the internal connection between word pronunciation and letters or letter combinations,and separate the teaching of word pronunciation from the teaching of letter combinations,so that students often feel difficult when they pronounce and spell the words,thus losing their enthusiasm for English learning gradually.Phonics can help students to learn word pronunciation and word spelling through grasping the relationships between letters or letter combinations and their pronunciations,and then enable the students to“read the words once they meet,spell the words once they hear”.Based on Piaget’s Cognitive Developmental Theory,Language Transfer Theory,and Developmental Spelling Theory,this study aims to verify whether the phonics can improve rural primary school students’word pronunciation scores and word spelling scores,and to explore its effects on their English vocabulary learning.By combining the quantitative and qualitative research methods,a16 weeks’experimental research was carried out among sixty 4^th-grade pupils from two parallel classes of a rural primary school in Shenyang,Liaoning Province.Thirty students accepted the vocabulary teaching with the application of the phonics in the Experimental Class,while the other thirty students accepted traditional vocabulary teaching in the Control Class.Through the word pronunciation and word spelling pretests and post tests in the EC and the CC,the questionnaire survey before and after the phonics teaching experiment in the EC,and the interview after the phonics teaching experiment in the EC,this research explored the effects of the phonics on rural primary school students’word pronunciation scores,word spelling scores,and their English vocabulary learning.After 16 weeks’phonics teaching experiment,according to the data analysis with the help of the SPSS Software 26.0,there are several major findings in this research.Firstly,the phonics can improve rural pupils’English word pronunciation scores.Secondly,the phonics can improve rural pupils’English word spelling scores.Thirdly,the phonics plays a positive role in improving rural pupils’English vocabulary learning.After learning the phonics,students in the EC make significant progress in word pronunciation and word spelling comparing with students in the CC.Moreover,students’English vocabulary learning motivation,confidence,learning method,cooperation and interaction with their English teacher and classmates also have significant improvements.The results above indicate that it is effective to apply the phonics to rural primary school English vocabulary teaching,which can not only optimize teachers’English vocabulary teaching process,but also improve students’English vocabulary learning effects.