A Study On The Application Of Phonics In Rural Primary School English Classrooms

The Compulsory Education English Curriculum Standard(2011 Edition)requires students who can attain the secondary goal to have a good command of about 600-700 words and read simple words according to spelling rules.Phonics,as an effective way to help students read and memorize new words,is more and more widely used in primary schools.However,there are some misunderstandings and problems when teachers adopt phonics teaching method,especially in rural primary schools.Considering the current situation of English teaching in rural primary school,the author takes 26 teachers and 461 students from rural primary schools as participants to do this research.The research questions include the following three aspects:(1)What are students’ and teachers’ attitudes and understandings of phonics?(2)How do teachers use phonics in rural primary schools?(3)What are the problems in the use of phonics?In the research,three research instruments are used: questionnaire,classroom observation and interview.The questionnaires are mainly to know students’ and teacher’s attitudes and understandings of phonics.Classroom observation aims to observe teacher’s application of phonics and students’ performance in classrooms.The interview is conducted to get more detailed information that can’t be collected by questionnaire and classroom observation.After two months of observation and a large amount of data analysis,the following major findings are drawn:(1)Students and teachers hold positive attitude to phonics.Of all students surveyed,91.5% think phonics is interesting;90.7% say that they would like to use phonics in English learning and 90.9% think phonics is very helpful;90.0% hope that teachers can use phonics more often in English teaching and 94.8% are willing to learning more about phonics.Of the 26 surveyed teachers,57.69% say they will use phonics actively and 42.31% say they are willing to use phonics in teaching.(2)Teachers use phonics along with the text,offer supplementary readingmaterial and keep intensive review.Teachers can achieve layered teaching and they pay attention to developing students’ autonomous learning ability.(3)In the application of phonics,there are some problems.On the one hand,students lack phonemic awareness and fail to segment phonemes.They are also not proficient in spelling rules.Their understandings of words and sentences are poor and they lack effective and active participation during the learning activity.On the other hand,some teachers misunderstand phonics and do not emphasize the cultivation of phonemic awareness.In the teaching process,teachers ignore student analysis and the evaluation methods are partial.Based on the findings,the author proposes some operable suggestions on the use of phonics in rural primary schools,hoping to enlighten the English teaching there.