A Study On Fostering Younger Learners’Phonological Awareness In Classroom English Teaching

Phonological Awareness is most commonly defined as one’s sensitivity to, or explicit awareness of, the phonological structure of words in one’s language. In short, it involves the ability to notice, think about, or manipulate the individual sounds in words (Torgesen&Mathes,1998). Phonological Awareness helps speakers distinguish different meanings of each word through distinguishing each individual sound in a word. In that case, sound-grapheme correspondences are built up. Studies show that the main problem and difficulty younger learners facing when they learn a kind of alphabetic language is building up a relationship between sounds of words and their printed forms. The relationship can help the learners recognize the printed forms of words and write out words they hear. Phonological awareness is the core element for the learners to decode the sound of words in order to achieve the aim of recognizing the words. It is high correlative between phonological awareness and word spelling and memorization and so on, therefore, language acquisition and phonological awareness are inseparable. In recent twenty years, phonological awareness (especially English phonological awareness) has always been the very welcomed focus among wide arrange of studies: Linguistics, Language Teaching and Psychology. Phonological Awareness of different languages have been researched, which includes not only researches on phonological awareness of native languages, but also includes researches on that of languages as second or foreign languages, and at the same time includes the transferring role of phonological awareness between two languages. It is commonly accepted by researchers that language learners’knowledge and ability of English can be enriched and improved through fostering their phonological awareness.In China, English is still being studied in classroom as a foreign language. The concept and its meaning of phonological awareness have not been accepted commonly by all the Chinese English teachers teaching in primary schools. The important role of phonological awareness training in English learning has not been recognized, not even mention the unified operations on training students’phonological awareness. Fortunately, these current situations provide the author a concrete researching background and opportunity. The author has read a large amount of literature reviews on English phonological awareness written by researches abroad and at home. Based on the literature reviews, an experiment which lasts one year long on fostering younger learners English phonological awareness has been implemented in the author’s primary school classroom teaching. This research attempts to discern the influence of phonological awareness and explore the important role of it in the teaching context in China. The author intends to deal with the three researching questions as below:1. Does adding explicit, specified English phonological awareness training promote younger learners’phonological awareness level in primary school classroom teaching under the present, traditional teaching mode? And to what extent? In what ways?2. Does phonological awareness training facilitate younger learners’English capacity? And to what extent?3. Does phonological awareness enhance younger learners’ interests and confidence of English learning?Before the experiment, the author collected the fist-hand data on English learning interests and attitudes and their actual phonological awareness level of the students from both the experimental and control classes through pre-questionnaire and pre-test. Delicate and systematic plan was designed according to the analysis of the first-handed data of the pre-questionnaire and pre-test. During the experiment, the subjects from the experimental class were received the training on phonological awareness, mainly focused on phonemic awareness. After the experiment, the author delivered the post-questionnaire and post-test on students language learning interests and attitudes, English language capacity and phonological awareness level to all the subjects from both experimental and control classes. Data comparison and analysis before and after the experiment indicates the changes of the students of the experimental class and the difference between experimental and control classes. The literature study and the research project are concluded with such answers:1. During the process of learning English as a foreign language, phonological awareness training effectively promotes younger learners’phonological awareness level.2. Phonological awareness can improve learners’ English capacity. Their word recognition ability can be improved significantly.3. Training on phonological awareness and phoneme-grapheme correspondence can enhance students’ interests and confidence in learning English.This study shows that the implicit, indirect, fragmented penetration of phonological awareness fostering mixed in the traditional English teaching is not enough to make students understand the English voice presentation clearly and effectively, not mention to help students establish the relationship between voice presentation and text presentation, thereby enhancing the ability to recognize words, to lay a solid foundation for further learning good English. Explicit, specified phonological awareness training courses are necessary.