小学英语教学中语音意识与单词拼写准确度的相关性研究

1、小学英语教学中语音意识与单词拼写准确度的相关性研究Chapter 1 IntroductionEnglish is a global language widely used in daily work and communication.However, as a foreign language, a variety of problems have been encountered by theChinese students in the process of learning English, especially in acquiring vocabulary.To master

2、the English vocabulary, the most difficult part is the spelling of the word.English, unlike Chinese, is an alphabetic language. Many scholars believe that ifwords are spelt on the basis of pronunciation, the spelling accuracy will be improved(Marlene & Robert, 1996; Ding Chaopeng & Peng Danl

3、ing, 1998; Joseph, 2000; Su,2001; Yu Chaochao, 2013). Except loan words, a large majority of words can belearned in such a way. It relies heavily on alphabetic principles involvingunderstanding the naming and sounds of letters, and combining sounds into words(Zgonc, 2000).1.1 Research BackgroundPhon

4、ological Awareness is most commonly defined as one’s sensitivity to, orexplicit awareness of, the phonological structure of words in one’s language. In short,it involves the ability to notice, think about, or manipulate the individual sounds inwords (Mathes & Torgesen, 1998).People d

5、epend on words or sentences which are composed of words to achievehuman thinking activity and communication. The primary components of everylanguage are pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. People fit pronunciation,grammar and innumerable vocabulary together as a language to express andcommunicate

6、. Vocabulary is the building material of language. It is essential andfundamental in language learning.English pronunciation has its variants such as British accent and American accent.No matter what kind of variant is, a correct pronunciation will help students toremember the spelling of the vocabu

7、lary accuracy. The Chinese Ministry of Educationhas enacted a new Nine-year Compulsory Education School English CurriculumStandards in 2011. It states that pronunciation teaching is one of the most importantthings in language teaching. At the beginning of English teaching, the best way to develop ph

8、onological awareness is to teach pronunciation. Charles Fries, who was aleading figure in applying structural linguistics to L2 teaching, makes this priorityvery clear: In learning a new language, the chief problem is not at first that oflearning vocabulary items. It is, first, the mastery of the so

9、und system;(Saville-Troike, 2008).In China, a large part of English teachers believe that children are born with astrong imitation ability, and they will naturally and gradually grasp the pronunciationin the process of learning English. Therefore, they think that it is not necessary tospend too much

10、 time in pronunciation teaching and phonological awareness training.Consequently, pronunciation teaching and phonological awareness training does notreach the designated position. In some places, especially in the rural primary andsecondary schools, phonological awareness training is almost blank. O

11、n the otherhand, the large-sized class and the lack of teaching hours for English course havemade it hard for the teacher to give students more detailed phonological awarenesstraining. Exam-oriented education baton has forced most teachers to focus on thegrammar, reading and other exam items.1.2 Sig

12、nificance and PurposeIn China, although students usually study English from grade three in primaryschool till university, yet the time for English studying is still insufficient. In thelimited time, most students normally learn the spelling and pronunciation ofvocabulary by rote memory, which result

13、 in a fact that the students are inefficient inlearning and easy to forget the vocabulary. If we can realize the relationship betweenphonological awareness and spelling accuracy, it is more likely for students to easilyremember the correct spelling and pronunciation of words for a long time.Accordin

14、g to the standards, we should focus on pronunciation, lexicon,morphology and syntax at the same time. Saville-Troike (2008) said: The humanaccomplishment of learning language(s) seems all the more remarkable when weconsider even a simplified list of the areas of knowledge which every L1 or L2 learne

15、rmust acquire at these different levels;. Actually, among the four items above, thebasic levels are lexicon and pronunciation which is one of the concrete representationsof phonology. The phonological level just means sound system, which includesphonemes, syllable structure, stress, pitch, pause, et

16、c. The lexical level is justconcerned with vocabulary, including four parts such as reading vocabulary, listeningvocabulary, speaking vocabulary and writing vocabulary (Clarence, 1968). This studyonly focuses pronunciation and spelling under the written form of the four parts.Chapter 2 Literature Re

17、viewPhonology is the study of the sound patterns and sound systems of languages (HuZhuanglin, 2011). Phonology aims to discover how speech sounds in a language formpatterns and how these sounds are used to convey meaning in linguisticcommunication (Dai Weidong, 2010). Minimal, phonemes, allophones,

18、free variation,complementary distribution, etc., are all to be investigated by phonologists.Phonological awareness, based on phonology, is commonly used in psycholinguistics.Phonological awareness is important because it is a basis for reading and spelling.Children begin to read by listening to othe

19、rs reading aloud, recognizing sounds in oralwords and shapes in written words, recognizing words with the same pronunciationbut different shapes (i.e. homonym), recognizing words with similar pronunciationand so on. In the course of phonological awareness training, children learn torecognize sound p

20、atterns among words and use this knowledge to read and buildwords.2.1 PhonologicalAwarenessPhonological awareness is commonly used in the field of westernpsycholinguistics. The research on phonological awareness can dates back fromBruce’s study in 1964 (cited Tunmer & Mary, 1991). It is sa

21、id that there have beenvarious definitions and explanations about phonological awareness. Gillon (2004)defines phonological awareness as an individual’s awareness of the phonologicalstructure, of words. Cattls and Kamhi (2005)’s study indicates that phonologicalawareness is one component

22、 of a large phonological processing system used forspeaking and listening. Mattingly (1972) finds out that phonological awareness isdifferent from other phonological abilities in that it is a metalinguistic skill, requiringconscious awareness and reflection on the structure of language. Jiang Tao an

23、d PengDanling (1996) summarizes different and complex views on the definitions ofphonological awareness from foreign scholars’ points of view in different researchingdomains. These different viewpoints on phonological awareness are classified intofour kinds which are discussed frequently as be

24、low:(1) Phonological awareness is the reaction and control of the phonemic fragment(Tunmer, 1997). For example, the word cat; can be segmented into sounds of /k/, / /and /t/. That is to say that phonological awareness just focuses on the phonemeswhich is the smallest unit of pronunciation, so it can

25、 also be called phonemicawareness (Li Haiyan, 2013). A phoneme is a phonological unit; it is a unit that is ofdistinctive value. As an abstract unit, a phoneme is not any particular sound, but ratherit is represented or realized by a certain phone in a certain phonetic context (HuZhuanglin, 2006).(2

26、) Phonological awareness not only includes phonemic awareness but alsoincludes syllable awareness (Morais, Bertelson, Cary & Alegrtia, 1986). Comparedwith the first concept, this definition is a little wider. For example, the word concept;can be segmented into two syllables: /con/ and /cept/, th

27、en each syllable can besub-segmented into three and four sounds respectively: /con/ into /c/, /o/ and /n/;/cept/ into /c/, /e/, /p/ and /t/.2.2 PhonologicalAwareness and SpellingSpelling errors can be seen in Chinese students’ tests or compositions everywhere.Students can’t remember the

28、words or grasp the rules of spelling. In the process ofEnglish learning, if students can understand and grasp some spelling rules, thespelling mistakes will be reduced (Shao Jinling, 2010; Zhang Baoyuan, 2011; LiHaiyan, 2013; Wang Jing, 2015).Children’s experiences with written language are in

29、fluenced by phonologicalawareness development dramatically, especially the development of phonemeawareness. Most children achieve minimal levels of phoneme awareness prior toliteracy instruction. Given that phonemes do not have physical reality independent ofeach other, children learn the names and

30、the sounds of letters to find out a concretecontent to phonemes. That is to say, phonemes produced in speech are inseparableacoustically because adjacent phonemes are co-articulated (Jason & David, 2005).In a research about spelling, Su (2001) tests the relationship betweenphonological awareness

31、 and spelling skills of adults. The participants are the studentsfrom different colleges in southern Taiwan. Each of them are tested by three tasks:spelling, dictation and phoneme deleting. It is concluded that dictation is morerelevant than phoneme deleting in terms of spelling. It also shows that

32、the students’phonological awareness could predict the accuracy of spelling.Ball and Blachman (1991) designed an activity called Say-It-and-Move-It;, inwhich the teachers teach English phonemes systematically and progressively frommono-phoneme to diphoneme and then to tri-phoneme. In order to h

33、elp students tolearn the association of phoneme segmentation and letters, they write the letters in theexercises. The activity shows that the students get higher and higher scores and makeless and less mistakes after practicing again and again, which means phonologicalawareness has been accepted by

34、the students and it helps the rightness of spelling.Chapter 3 Research Design. 213.1 Research Questions. 213.2 Research Methodology . 213.2.1 Research participants . 213.2.2 Research instruments . 223.2.3 Teaching and training procedures . 243.2.4 Data collection . 30Chapter 4 Results and Discussion

35、. 314.1 Data Analysis . 314.1.1 Data analysis of the pre-test. 314.1.2 Data Analysis of the Mid-test . 364.1.3 Data Analysis of the Post-test . 394.2 Findings and Discussion . 464.3 Correlations between Phonological Awareness and Spelling . 484.4 Other Wrong Spelling Independent of Phonological Awar

36、eness . 50Chapter 5 Conclusion. 515.1 Major Findings. 515.2 Implications. 525.3 Limitations and Suggestions for Future Studies . 54Chapter 4 Results and DiscussionThis research is conducted with relevant tests (pre-test, mid-test and post-test) asthe instrument. All tests are conducted in both the e

37、xperimental class and the controlclass, and the results have been collected by the author. There are two parts of tests. Inthe three spelling tests, students are tested with 35 words chosen from Model One toModel Five in their Phonetics and Pronunciation textbook which is published byForeign Languag

38、e Teaching and Research Press. Each word has the value of one point.All the three spelling tests use the same paper. However, before finishing the mid-test,students didn’t know the correct answer and the result. The other test is the test ofphonological awareness in the experimental class. Con

39、sidering the spelling level ofthe students, the phonological awareness papers are designed based on their workbook.All the papers are marked by the author.4.1 DataAnalysisThe subjects in this research are Grade 3 students from two bilingual classes in aprimary school. They are learning English as th

40、e second foreign language. The firstforeign language of them is Chinese and they begin to learn English from Grade 3. Atthe first class meeting, the teacher arranges a short-term memory game in the twoclasses, which is adopted as the pre-test. The following tables are the data analysis ofthe pre-tes

41、t, which is analyzed by using SPSS 17.0.The pre-test is conducted to examine the spelling level of the two classes. If themean value of the experimental class and control class is a large one which means thetwo classes can not be chosen as the subjects of this study and can not be comparableto each

42、other. There are 28 valid papers in the experimental class and control classrespectively. After collecting the data from these valid papers, the author analyzes themean value of the two classes. It can be seen from Table P-1 that the mean value ofthe experimental class is 9.536 and the mean value of

43、 the control class is 9.018. Themean difference of the two classes is 0.5179, which indicates that the two classes canbe chosen as the subjects of this teaching experiment.ConclusionEnglish language, Chinese language and Korean language have their distinctivedevelopment in the history, and belong to three different families of language.Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family, and English belongs to theIndo-European family, but the majority of historical linguists classify Korean aslanguage isolation. As a result, these three languages much