A Study On The Effect Of Dual-Route Approach On The Teaching Of English Word Recognition For 7-Grade Students

Word recognition refers to the competence of reading aloud the written words or the ability of extracting words' semantic meanings, including words decoding ability and sight words reading ability. It plays an important role in second language(L2)reading. However, due to the differences between the English and Chinese writing systems, Chinese students have difficulty both in converting the print to speech, and in extracting words' semantic meanings in English. The Dual-Route Model---a psycholinguistic model proposed by Coltheart(1993) proposes that there are two routes to convert print to speech: lexical route and phonological route. The lexical route is the process to recognize words in which a set of printed letters activates the entry for the corresponding words in our internal lexicon. The phonological route,however, is a process to recognize words by using a set of translation rules to convert written graphemes into spoken phonemes. In the present study, the researcher tries to make full use of the rules of dual-route approach to teach word recognition for7-grade Chinese English learners, focusing on the phonological route.This study adopted an experimental teaching method which lasted about eight weeks. The subjects were 85 7-grade learners in a middle school in Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province. They came from Class 1 and Class 2, with 43 students and 42 students respectively, aging from 11 to 13 years old. Before the experiment, the two classes were made to do a pretest of word recognition, to ensure that there was no significant difference on the word recognition between the two classes. Then Class 1 was the control group and Class 2 was the experimental group. In the control group the students were taught with the traditional method, while those in the experimental group were taught by introducing the phonological rules. After eight weeks, they took a post test of word recognition. In order to further investigate phonological awareness of the two classes after the experiment, students also did a phonological awareness test just after the post test.The results of this study are as the follows. First, the results of independent samples of post test showed that the two groups did have significant difference in thepost test with the 2-tailed Sig. 0.026(<0.05). That is to say, the dual-route approach does have positive effect on word recognition. Second, the results of the phonological awareness test showed that there was a significant difference on phonological awareness between the two groups with the 2-tailed Sig. 0.014(<0.05), which indicates that during the learning through phonological rules, the phonological awareness has also been improved.Based on the above findings, this study provides English teachers the following implications. First, English teachers should teach more phonological rules during the teaching of English word recognition. Second, English teachers should improve learners' word decoding ability by training and developing their phonological awareness, to further improve their reading ability.