A Research On The Application Of Phonics Instruction To English Vocabulary Teaching In Junior High School

Vocabulary,as a fundamental component of English language proficiency,plays an important role in English learning of junior high school.Nevertheless,traditional vocabulary teaching method only lays emphasis on the meaning and usage of words,ignoring helping students effectively decode and remember new words.Consequently,this situation results in the fact that Chinese English learners have trouble in memorizing new words.Meanwhile,International Phonetic Alphabet is a mechanical vocabulary learning method,which makes vocabulary memory time-consuming and low-efficient.Therefore,it is significantly necessary to adopt an effective method to maintain a large storage of vocabulary in English vocabulary learning.Currently,phonics as one of the most popular vocabulary learning methods can make learners fluently read and accurately spell new words.Phonics stems from a reading instruction in the United States,which encourages learners to master the pronunciation of 44 phonemes in order to pronounce words they have never seen before and spell words by listening to their pronunciations.This thesis aims to research the relationship between the sound and form in vocabulary teaching so that teacher can assist students in remembering and decoding new words effectively and finally develop their interest in English learning.Based on constructivism and Bruner's discovery learning,this research is undertaken to investigate the impacts of phonics instruction to English vocabulary teaching in junior high school in terms of three dimensions: interest,reading and spelling.Three research questions are addressed as followed:1.Can phonics instruction arouse students' interest in English vocabulary learning?2.Can phonics instruction dramatically improve students' ability to read words?3.Can phonics instruction efficiently promote students' ability to spell words?The experiment lasted 16 weeks from 1st September to 22 nd December in order to answer three research questions.Two parallel classes composed of 85 junior high school students in Grade 7 from Shenyang were chosen as the participants.Class One(n=42)was taught by phonics instruction as the experimental class(EC),while Class Two(n=43)was taught by International Phonetic Alphabet as the control class(CC).The questionnaire was distributed to two classes to test students' interest in English vocabulary learning.Four vocabulary tests were conducted to find out if their ability to read and spell words has been improved.Besides,the interview was carried out in EC to explore more in-depth information.A series of collected statistics were analyzed by SPSS 19.0.The research manifests that there are significant differences between two teaching methods at the end of the four-month treatment period.The result yields that the students who come from EC become more interested in English vocabulary learning,and they can read and spell words more fluently and accurately than CC students.In the light of these conclusions,the thesis puts forward the detailed implications and recommendations,which are expected to make great contributions to English teaching and future researches.