An Empirical Study On The Influence Of Phonetics Teaching In Rural Middle School English Learning

In the course of the practical English Teaching in rural middle school,many teachers could not provide their students with a complete and correct phonetic learning process for the limitation of teacher resources,textbook,and exam system etc.The students failed to obtain a phonetic ability which is good enough to support the entire English language learning process.As a result,the students in those areas are doomed to face many problems with English study.Based on the points above,the author,thinking from the perspective of his rural middle school teaching experience raises two research questions:whether phonetics teaching is valued by the teachers and students in the rural middle school;how to effectively apply phonetic teaching to the students in the rural middle school.The author tries to study the effects that phonetics teaching could bring to the overall English study in the rural middle school,analyze the reasons and offer some solutions accordingly.This study takes 85 students of two classes from Linggou middle school in Xiuyan Manchu Autonomous County.Class one is taken as Control Class and Class two is chosen as Experimental Class.Generally,there is no evident difference of phonetic ability and phonetic learning motivation.The experiment lasted for 4 months.The experiment is divided into three stages.Before the experiment,the author carried out a pre-test and a questionnaire to get a general idea about the students’ phonetic learning ability and overall English achievement.In the process of the experiment,the Control Class was taught with conventional teaching method,while the Experimental Class was taught with a phonetics oriented teaching method.After the experiment,the author designed a post-test for the students,and made a comparative analysis on the collected data.The author finds that that:first of all,as a result of the limitation of rural middle school English teachers’ professional quality,the influence of the exam-oriented teaching teaching view,the lack of necessary phonetic resources and the restrictions of various other factors,phonetic teaching in the vast rural areas is not valued for a long time,or even neglected.Second,the performance of the students in the Experimental Class is obviously better than those in Control Class.This means that comparatively,the students in the Experimental Class have formed good phonetic basis by using phonetic teaching methods such as Phonic and Mock reading and so on.They learn English in a more scientific and effective way.Given that,the author proposes some specific suggestions and strategies on English phonetic teaching in rural middle school so as to further the development of English teaching in rural middle schools.