An Action Research Approach Towards Using Phonics In English Vocabulary Teaching In Junior High Schools

Phonics,which is a way of teaching English vocabulary by combining the sound of letters and spelling of the word together,plays an important role in vocabulary learning especially for younger age learners.After learning phonics,students might read out the word when seeing its spelling,and spell the word when hearing the pronunciation of the word.It will directly improve the vocabulary memorization efficiency both in pronunciation and spelling of the words.However,studies,especially action research reports,on how to effectively use phonics in English vocabulary teaching of junior high schools are insufficient.Therefore,the author made an action research in English classes in a junior high school in order to provide some suggestions to the phonics teaching in junior high schools.Research participants are forty-five students,who are in a junior high school of Zibo.The action research lasts for sixteen weeks.The research mainly focuses on the following three questions: 1.How can phonics be used to raise students’ phonemic awareness effectively? 2.How can phonics be used to improve students’ vocabulary reading out ability effectively? 3.How can phonics be used to improve students’ vocabulary spelling ability? During the action research,the author chooses both quantitative and qualitative research instruments.The qualitative research instruments include interview,classroom observation and teaching logs.The quantitative data analysis consists of the words reading out and spelling tests.The author will use the tool--Statistical Product Service Solutions(SPSS)to analyze the data so as to measure students’ learning situation in a scientific and accurate way.The results show that by learning phonics,students’ phonemic awareness,words reading out ability and words spelling ability have been improved significantly.The study also shows that the use of phoneme separation,phoneme recognition,phoneme classification,phoneme segmentation,phoneme deletion,phoneme addition and phoneme replacement during the phonics teaching can effectively improve students’ phonemic awareness.By the application of words reading out and words spelling strategies,which includes turntable games,syllables division,audio-visual multi-modal input,tongue twisters,phonics flip books and other methods,students’ reading out ability and spelling ability can be improved effectively.