The Application Of Phonics To English Vocabulary Teaching In Primary School

Vocabulary teaching is an important part of English teaching, yet to learners especiallyprimary school students, memorizing a large amount of words is a big difficulty. In dailyvocabulary teaching, most English teachers adopt the traditional teaching method, which is aninefficient and mechanic teaching method and focuses on rote learning. As a result, it neglectsthe internal relationship between sounds and letters, which makes learners unable to decodethe words. It is very necessary to provide an effective vocabulary learning method to helpprimary school students expand their vocabulary.And phonics is a vocabulary teaching method worthy of our efforts. It makes studentslearn vocabulary in a more autonomous way by establishing the correspondent relationshipbetween letters or letter combinations and the form of words. The study of phonics abroad hasmade great achievement, however, most studies of phonics are conducted among learners inEnglish speaking countries and the studies in non-English speaking countries are far fromadequate. So there is big room for the Chinese English teachers to apply the method to theirvocabulary teaching.Owing to the importance of vocabulary learning, and the shortage of applying phonics inprimary school teaching currently, the author conducts a collaborative research in a primaryschool in Qingdao. This study employs the methods of questionnaire, experiment andinterview. The questionnaire shows, by comparing the results of questions about interestbetween experimental class and control class at the end of the semester, that phonics canstimulate students’ interests in learning English vocabulary. In the experiment, theexperimental class and control class (randomly selected) separately use phonics andtraditional method to conduct vocabulary teaching the whole semester. By analyzing results ofthe mid-term exam, final exam and three individual tests about “sound”,“shape”,“meaning”of words at the end of the semester, it could be found that phonics can improve students’abilities to learn English vocabulary. Through the interview, some teaching suggestions of applying phonics in primary school English class can be summarized through analyzing theEnglish teachers’ conversations from experimental class and those from control class at theend of the semester.