A Case Study On The Impact Of Phonics On English Reading Efficiency Of Junior High School Student

Reading involves two aspects: the decoding of the text and the comprehension of the text.Accordingly,research of reading focuses on two areas: the decoding ability(phonological awareness,reading fluency)and the reading comprehension ability(reading skills and reading strategies,language knowledge).However,no matter what area it is,the ultimate goal of the research is to improve students’ reading efficiency.Reading efficiency is a typical characteristic of good readers and an important part of improving students’ overall English ability.In recent years,phonics has become a popular topic of academic research,emphasizing decoding ability based on phonological and word-form correspondence.However,previous research has focused on the important role of phonics in promoting phonological and lexical decoding ability,while the relationship between phonics and reading has been less discussed.Phonological awareness and word decoding ability are also the most basic parts of English reading.Therefore,whether phonics has an effect on reading is a topic worth exploring.This paper attempts to investigate the effect of phonics on junior high school students’ reading efficiency by means of case study.The writer selected eight students of different levels in the same class to participate in this study.Without disrupting the normal teaching order,the writer taught the phonics rules for seven weeks in order to investigate the effect of phonics on junior high school students’ reading efficiency.This paper attempts to answer the following three questions:(1)What is the effect of phonics on junior high school students’ English reading fluency(reading accuracy and reading speed)?(2)What is the effect of phonics on junior high school students’ English reading comprehension ability?(3)What is the effect of phonics on junior high school students’ English reading attitudes?Based on the theory of L1 transfer,the theory of reading stages and the theory of critical period of language acquisition,this paper yielded the following results through testing,interview and classroom observation:(1)Phonics improves students’ reading fluency.In other words,phonics improves students’ reading accuracy and reading speed.(2)Phonics is not effective in promoting students’ reading comprehension ability.(3)Phonics can help to transform students’ attitudes towards English reading,which means that students’ interest in reading increases.This study integrates phonics with reading,which can help to enrich the research related to phonics to a certain extent and provide some reference for reading instruction.However,due to the teaching load and the fact that students are busy with their school work,this study has limitations such as small sample size,experiments with only the subjects themselves and short research time.It is hoped that in future teaching practice,the writer can improve this research by applying it to a larger sample and setting up another group of students with comparable levels but who have not learned phonics before as a control group for a longer period.