A Study On The Effect Of Phonics Instruction On Chinese EFL Beginners’ Vocabulary Learning

English has been becoming a more and more significant international language. The vocabulary is critically important to all the English learners. From 2001,English has become a required subject in primary school in China. According to The Curriculum Standard Of Elementary School English,the aim of English teaching in primary school is to arouse kids’ interests in learning English,and at the mean time laying a good foundation for their further study in higher school.Helping kids learn how to learn English is more important than only teaching them the language. It seems more significant for primary school teachers to introduce and explore new teaching ways to improve both the quality and the efficiency of their English teaching. Teachers will go on needing methods to a wide range of information to help pupils succeed, including instructions about English. We should constantly develop and discover good teaching ways from valuable educational theories, researches, and teaching practice. However, both teaching and learning of English in primary schools have so many various problems and difficulties. Some of the children are afraid of learning English since they don’t know how to learn English and how to learn English easily. Especially, they have great difficulty in learning the correct pronunciation of each English word and memorizing its spellings. In this experiment, the author will try to study with a new method to help kids deal with English words: the phonetic system of the English language.We know that English orthography is quite different from our Chinese orthography. The great differences between them will have extremely difficulties on Chinese beginners’ English vocabulary learning. Therefore, for Chinese beginners, they should pay more attention to the letter-sound correspondence of English words, and the major aim in English vocabulary teaching is to train students to read out the word when they see it, to write it down when they hear it. In fact, phonics approach is an important teaching method in western countries to teach children English. It has approved that phonics is an effective access to developing students’ phonological awareness and self-spelling ability of the students. However, since these findings are based on kids who speak English as their native language and it is not sure if phonics instruction could be generalized to kids in China who learn English as a foreign language. Therefore, my study mainly focuses on the effect of phonics instruction on Chinese beginners’ vocabulary learning.There are six parts in the thesis. Chapter One is the introduction of the thesis including three parts. Chapter Two summarizes a detailed review of related literature about phonics instruction. Chapter Three focuses on theoretical foundations of phonics instruction. Chapter Four describes the methodology applied in the study. Chapter Five reports the results of the study and discusses the possible factors responsible for the results. Chapter Six gives the major findings, implications, discusses the limitations of the study and also puts forward some suggestions for future studies.