A Study Of The Correlation Between Chinese Elementary EFL Learners' Phonological Awareness And Their Spelling Ability

In the process of foreign language learning, spelling is a very important yet arduous task among emergent learners, children in particular. A lot of researches show that proficient spelling is closely related to phonological awareness. However, as for the correlation between various tasks of phonological awareness at different levels and spelling ability, different researchers have drawn different conclusions. Therefore, the present study probes into the relationship between Chinese elementary EEL learners'phonological awareness and their spelling ability and further finds out the correlations between them.The present study consists of six chapters. The first chapter is general introduction. The second chapter is literature review, wherein the study of phonological awareness,spelling and the relationship between the two are presented. The third chapter states what theory can provide grounds for the explanation of the results. The continuum of complexity (Chard & Dickson, 1999) and five-stage developmental model of phonological awareness (Adams, 1990) explain the developmental characteristics of phonological awareness, while the theory of five-stage pattern in word spelling (Gentry, 1982) accounts for EFL elementary children's development trend in spelling. The fourth chapter describes this study itself in detail. Twenty-four participants representing Grade 4, 5 & 6 provided effective data. Cassady et al. (2007)'computer-supported standardized assessment of phonological awareness is used as measurement of phonological awareness with five tasks: rhyming, oddity detection, blending, segmenting and phonemic manipulation. Spelling tasks take Primary spelling inventory (Words Their Way, 2008) as testing instrument. The fifth chapter is the section of results and discussion including descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and hierarchical regression analysis.The conclusion of the study in chapter six are shown as follows: 1) In Grade 4, 5 & 6, performance of oddity detection task was best among five tasks, then the task of rhyming and phonemic manipulation, the performance of blending task and segmenting task ranked last. The general tendency of phonological awareness was rising. 2) The general tendency of students'performance on spelling test was gradually rising from Grade 4 to Grade 6. Most students were at emergent and early letter name-alphabetic spelling stage. 3) Phonological awareness and spelling ability was positively related. The correlations between five discrete tasks of phonological awareness and spelling ability become higher as students'years of English learning increase. Among the five tasks, rhyming task and oddity task are better predicators of spelling ability than the other three tasks. Further analysis on the correlation between spelling ability and fourteen sub-tasks shows that rhyming application, oddity detection tasks-ending sounds and middle sounds and phonological awareness are significantly correlated among the three grades. As for eight features of spelling tasks, there are significant correlations between phonological awareness and initial consonants, final consonants and blends. Hierarchical regression analysis on spelling ability and five discrete tasks indicated that in Grade 4, rhyming task had a significant effect on spelling ability, the other four tasks did not contribute to spelling ability; in Grade 5 and Grade 6, spelling ability was affected by both rhyming task and oddity detection task, the other three tasks did not contribute to spelling ability.