The Application Of Phonics Teaching To Underachievers’ English Vocabulary Learning In Middle School

Vocabulary occupies fundamental place in English learning.However,it is difficult for junior school freshmen,especially the underachievers,to memorize a large amount of words.One of the reasons is that teachers,in daily vocabulary teaching,focus mostly on the meaning and usage of words rather than the internal relationship between sounds and letters;Students have to rely on nothing but mechanical memorization when learning new words.Thus providing English underachievers with an effective vocabulary learning method is a top agenda that the teachers must undertake without delay and phonics teaching seems a preferable option.Phonics method is to build up the corresponding relationship between English letters,letter combinations and the form of words with the assumption that students,by mastering the pronunciation rules,can greatly improve the autonomous learning ability.Phonics is advocated in middle school learning because it suits kids’ cognitive features;It simplifies the complicated spelling rules so that English underachievers can learn new words more easily;It also improves English underachievers’ learning willingness and sense of achievement.This study,based on the cognitive development theory,theory of memory and transfer theory,explores the effective role phonics plays in promoting vocabulary teaching in the middle school.The research lasted for 4 months.The subjects of the study were the seventh-grade students from a middle school in Fuzhou.A questionnaire survey and a teaching experiment have been conducted.The introduction of the spelling rules,spelling teaching and teaching students according to the textbook with the phonics method have been done one after another during the experiment process.A pre-test and post-test have been carried out to measure the effectiveness of the experiment.The analytical result reveals that the experimental group has greatly improved their vocabulary proficiency than the control group,and so proves that the phonics is an effective method to help English underachievers learn vocabulary in a more effective way.