A Study Of The Application Of Phonics Instruction To Phonological Teaching In EFL Context

EFL learners have long been puzzled by the irregular spellings of English. They often feel helpless and powerless to pronounce and spell the word correctly.Consequently, the incapability of spelling and pronunciation leads to the stagnation of reading skill and the slow expansion of vocabulary, let alone the loss of enjoyment in study. In fact, this vicious circle is caused by their unawareness of the intrinsic law in English. As long as the language is learned by its nature, there will be great progress at all levels.This thesis aims at investigating the inherent correspondence between letter and sound, and studying the feasibility of applying Phonics Instruction to the EFL context.The author first selects an authoritative dictionary – the 7th edition of Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary(2009) – as the basis of the updating work of the corpus. When the preparation is finished, the research comes to the scientific investigation of the letter-sound correspondence. With the help of the computer program, the research starts with the 44 phonemes. All the phonemes are grouped by their qualities and sequenced according to the lexical frequency. Then the author moves on to the letter-sound correspondence of vowel, r-controlled vowel, and consonant. The research mainly focuses on the single letter vowel, vowel digraph,single letter consonant, double letter consonant, silent consonant letter, consonant digraph, and some specific letter and letter combinations. From the analysis of the statistics, the letter-sound correspondence in English can be reflected in the lexical frequency. Generally, the higher the lexical frequency, the more stable and reliable the relationship between letter and sound is.Based on the scientific research, the author discusses the pedagogical implications of applying Phonics Instruction to the EFL classroom. The application of phonics should contain three parts: the phonetic teaching combined with phonemic awareness training, the teaching of letter-sound correspondence, and the teaching of morphological structure. In phonetic teaching, the teacher presents phonemes with the aid of phonetic symbols and the teaching of phonetic knowledge is accompanied by the phonemic awareness training of cases with high lexical frequency. When teaching letter-sound correspondence, the teacher is suggested to take into full consideration the lexical frequency and also explore the most applicable part of phonics withgeneralization of pronunciation rules and exceptional restrictions. The teaching of morphological structure is also worth notice by the EFL teachers for they can bring it to other aspects of phonics teaching. All the three parts of Phonics Instruction are indispensable and actually complementary to each other. The synthetic application of phonics to EFL teaching and learning will largely improve pronunciation, spelling,and reading skills, and contribute to a quick and effective command of vocabulary,which brings real fun for EFL learners.