Abstract

For English beginners, it is of great importance to lay a solid foundation of phonics and own a large vocabulary. In China, the teaching practice reveals that it is of great difficulty for students to spell and read words by themselves, and that a large quantity of students has no idea of the relations between pronunciation and spelling, which leads to the situation where students memorize English words mechanically and inefficiently.

 Phonics of English has aroused wide attention in language teaching in the west, which proves to b effective. But most of the research objects are those who learn English as the mother tongue or second language, instead of those who regard English as foreign language. Based on previous research findings on phonics, this paper divide 60 grade three students in Hangzhou into two groups.One is the control group and taught with traditional teaching method, while another is the experiment group and taught with phonics, each group having pre-test and post-test in order to assess whether the vocabulary learning level has been raised, and thus to observe the relations between phonics and vocabulary learning. 

The great progress of the experiment group compared with the control group in the post-test indicates that Phonics is effective on the vocabulary learning of students who learn English as a foreign language. According to the research findings, this paper also come up with some suggestions on how to learn vocabulary for primary school students better with the help of phonics.

Keywords: phonics; primary school students; English as a foreign language; vocabulary learning

Contents

Abstract

摘  要

1. Introduction-1

1.1 Research Background-1

1.2 Significance of the Study-1

1.3 Structure of the Thesis-2

2. Literature Review-2

2.1 Phonics Instruction-2

2.1.1 Definition of Phonics Instruction-2

2.1.2 Phonics Instruction Approaches-3

2.2 Research at Home and Abroad-3

2.2.1 Research at Abroad-3

2.2.2 Research at Home-4

3. Methodology-5

3.1 Research Questions-5

3.2 Participants-5

3.3 Instruments-5

3.3.1 Pre-test and Post-test-5

3.3.2 Class Observation-6

3.4 Procedures of Instruction-6

4. Results and Discussion-7

4.1 Results-7

4.2 Discussion-8

5. Conclusion-9

5.1 Major Findings-9

5.2 Limitations-9

5.3 Recommendations-9

References-10