An Empirical Study On The Application Of Phonics To English Vocabulary Teaching In Primary Schools

Vocabulary is the foundation of English learning.While in traditional vocabulary teaching,teachers are considered to be the center of the whole teaching procedure,all the procedures are pre-designed by them,and the students only need to follow the teachers to repeat the new words.The results are that students have little interests in vocabulary learning and have very little effects.Phonics is based on the Noticing Hypothesis and Constructivism theory,which emphasizes that students are the center of the class,and teachers should give the initiative back to the students.In this research,the author imply the Phonics to primary school English class and try to find the effects it has on the students,The research questions are addressed as follows:1)What effects can Phonics have on arousing the students’ affection and attitude in learning English vocabulary?2)What effects can Phonics have on improving students’ English word spelling ability in primary schools?In this experiment,the author mainly conducts the questionnaires and pre-test and post-test and SPSS22,and the participants in this experiments are students from a primary school where the author works.Between the two classes,C1G5 is the experimental class(EC).The author emphasizes and applies the Phonics in this class;while C5G5 is the control class(CC),where the author still teaches English vocabulary withthe traditional approach like before.After one semester,the author conducts a questionnaire to check the effects that Phonics have on arousing the learners’ affection and attitude,and conducts a post-test with exam paper to find out the differences of spelling abilities under Phonics and traditional approach.Firstly,most of the students have showed their keen interests and positive attitude in the Phonics and prefer to learn new word’s pronunciation and spelling by using the Phonics.Most of the students prefer to read the new words according to the rules of the pronunciation of the letters or the letter combinations.They prefer to memorize words by using the Phonics.Secondly,Phonics can improve student’s English word spelling abilities.After the experiment of Phonics teaching,the students in EC have established a correspondent relationship between letter,letter combinations and pronunciation.Then they are able to change the pronunciation into letters and letter combinations.It also has a positive effect on reciting and memorizing the words.The research shows that Phonics has a positive effect on arousing the students’ affection and attitude,and can improve the students’ English vocabulary spelling abilities significantly.While there are still have some limitations,like the short experimental time,the limited samples and so on,all should be improved in the following studies.