Study On University Students' English Phonological Awareness And Productive Vocabulary

Up to now, phonological awareness has been researched by many scholars home and abroad. Among those previous studies, most of them focused on the correlation between English phonological awareness and reading ability, (e.g., Rieben & Perfetti, 1991), while the correlativity between phonological awareness and other basic language skills of English learners, especially for the adult learners, is rarely studied. Therefore, it is crucial and meaningful to further examine the relationship between phonological awareness and other basic language skills (listening, speaking and writing).The present study was designed to mainly investigate the correlativity between English phonological awareness and productive vocabulary among university students. Meanwhile, the correlation among phonological awareness'different linguistic levels was also explored in this paper. The subjects who participated in the study were 52 freshmen from Hei Longjiang University, majoring in Hydrogeology and Water Resources Engineering. In this research, phonological awareness was determined by ten measures. English productive vocabulary test adopted The Productive Vocabulary Level Test created by Nation (2001). With the instrument of SPSS17.0, various experimental results indicate that: (1) various linguistic aspects of? phonological awareness correlate with each other; (2) college students'English phonological awareness had significant positive correlation with their productive vocabulary; (3) among three important linguistic levels of phonological awareness, the phoneme awareness was a better predictor to productive vocabulary than the other two levels.Based on those results showed above, some implications were concluded. That is, to improve students'phonological awareness can help them make progress in their productive vocabulary learning, and the levels of students'productive vocabulary would be predicted by their performance on phonological awareness tasks. Therefore, the present study has practical implications for English vocabulary learning and teaching.