A Study On The Application Of Phonics To English Vocabulary Teaching In Primary School

As one of the three basic elements that constitute language,vocabulary is the basis of language learning,British linguist Wilkins,D.A(1972)once thought: “Without grammar,there is very little content that can be expressed,but without vocabularies,nothing can be expressed.” However,in the daily vocabulary teaching of primary schools,most English teachers use the traditional teaching methods to independently teach letters and vocabularies,ignoring the intrinsic relationship between vocabulary pronunciation and letters,which leads students can not decode vocabularies.What’s more,because of the different language,culture,and faculty,and the different sounds,shapes,and meanings of the vocabularies,most pupils have difficulties in spelling and memorizing vocabularies,which is also the main problem in the current primary school English teaching.Therefore,it is necessary to provide an effective way to learn vocabulary for pupils.Phonics is a method of enabling students to independently learn the pronunciation and spelling vocabularies by establishing a correspondence between letters or groups of letter.Phonics is not only a method of learning English pronunciation and spelling for children in English-speaking countries,but also a teaching method for English beginners who regarded English as a foreign language to learn pronunciation rules and spelling.Therefore,in China,Phonics can be applied to the primary school English vocabulary teaching.The author conducts an experiment to test the effectiveness of Phonics applied in English vocabulary teaching in primary school.Two questions are mainly discussed:(1)Can applying Phonics effectively promote students’ vocabulary pronunciation and spelling?(2)Does the application of Phonics have any influence on students’ English learning attitude and interest?This study takes two classes students in Grade Four from Qingshan primary school in Guiyang as the research subjects,and conducts an 18-week English teaching experiment on two classes.Among them,the Phonics is applied in the experimental group for vocabulary teaching,and the traditional vocabulary teaching method is adopted in the control group.The SPSS software was used to analyze the pre-test and post-test data of the two groups,and the questionnaire survey was only used in the experimental group to analyze the changes in English learning attitude and interest,vocabulary pronunciation and spelling ability before and after learning Phonics.The result shows that Phonics can not only improve students’ abilities to pronounce and spell vocabularies,but also change students’ attitude and improve students’ interest in English learning.