A Case Study On Primary School Novice English Teachers’ Beliefs And Practice About Phonics Teaching

Phonics teaching,a teaching and learning method that originates from English-speaking countries where children learn English as their native language,is particularly used for the children in kindergartens and primary schools.Besides,because of the recognization of many authoritative experts,gradually,phonics teaching has been popular in Chinese mainland,and many English teachers in primary school begin to adopt it into the class.Language transfer exists between Chinese and English.When Chinese children learn English as their foreign language,they rely on the help of the pronunciation of Chinese Pinyin.The pronunciations of some letters and letter combinations in phonics are the same as some Pinyin’s while some pronunciations are completely different,which,however,affects teaching and learning of phonics.Through the literature review,it is found that most studies have focused on the influence of phonics teaching on primary school and middle school students’ vocabulary learning,reading comprehension while there are few studies of beliefs and practice phonics teaching in teachers.Six primary school novice English teachers was chosen to be the research participants.The research questions are as follows:(1)What are the primary school novice English teachers’ beliefs about phonics teaching in primary school EFL teaching?(2)How do these primary school novice English teachers teach phonics in class?(3)What difficulties do these primary school novice English teachers encounter when applying phonics teaching?(4)What are the factors that influence these primary school novice English teachers’ phonics teaching?The research methods in this thesis are semi-structured interview and non-participant classroom observation.These novice teachers mainly talk about their beliefs about phonics teaching from perspectives of phonics itself,EFL teachers and teaching,EFL learners and learning,teaching materials,curriculum,etc.The main findings are as follows:(1)all of these novice teachers are used to comparing phonics teaching with phonetic symbols,and think that phonics teaching is more useful than teaching phonetic symbols for primary school students,especially in vocabulary;(2)they think subconsciously that phonics teaching is letting students know the pronunciation of new words.When apply phonics teaching,they emphasize the pronunciations of the letters and the letter combinations of words;(3)they all hold opinion that they are lacking in systematic training for novice teachers about how to apply phonics teaching and they haven’t known about phonics teaching wholly yet,and they are still in the process of exploration;(4)there are too few English lessons per week,and there are too little teaching content about phonics in the textbook,so that they take only part of the time to do phonics teaching.The implications of the research are(1)novice teachers know about phonics and know that they should teach the pronunciations of the letters and the letter combinations of the words.Consequently,students know about the correspondence between the phoneme and the grapheme.However,their teaching form is too single and emphasize too much on vocabulary teaching and learning,while it is better for them to add some other forms like paragraph reading,passage reading and picture books,etc;(2)schools could add English lessons appropriately so that novice teachers will have enough time to do phonics teaching;(3)related education department could invite expert foreign teachers whose mother tongue is English to demonstrate how to do phonics teaching for novice teachers,and invite excellent teachers who have a comprehensive understanding of phonics to train novice teachers at the same time.What’s more,schools should encourage novice teachers to apply phonics teaching in class;(4)for language transfer between English and Chinese,novice teachers could ask students to learn phonics under the guidance of positive language transfer of Pinyin.What’s more,novice teachers should spend more time correcting them separately if students have mixed the pronunciations of some letters or letter combinations of phonics with Chinese Pinyin.