Encountering words in English reading, Chinese pupils usually deal with it in three ways. First, they can directly recognize the sight words without analysis; the second is to guess the meaning through the context; The third is to read the words according to its correspondent figurative rules and speech skills. English is an alphabetic language. There is a correspondence between the spelling and its pronunciation. Alphabetic language marks the pronunciation of words through letters. You can know how it is spelled by sounds after mastering the spelling and pronunciation rules. In turn, you are able to read the word while seeing the form of the word. Choi Kun (2012) believes phonics teaching shall be taught throughout the learning process no matter what language to learn, especially the beginners. There are many other scholars like Hu Chundong (2004) represented that phonics teaching can promote the development of phonological awareness and improve spelling skills. Theoretically, phonics teaching method can guide pupils to decode unfamiliar words based on the relationship between letters and sounds and spell them. 

1.2 Significance and Purpose of the Study

Phonics teaching method appeared as a concept for decades in foreign countries. There are quite a lot of research and teaching practice show that phonics teaching method has a very important impact on teaching English reading.

Phonics method helps pupils to build the two concepts about the letter, Letter Name and Letter Sound. Letter Name is the name of the letter itself. At the same time, the letter A corresponds to a sound, as pronounces/ æ / in the word “apple”.The core is, to establish the correspondence relationships between letters or letter combinations with its English pronunciation, so that pupils can recognize and read the words by reading letter sounds (Liang Yue ting, 2012)

Phonics method is the basic skill for English reading especially for the beginners. Generally speaking, in phonics teaching philosophy, words are not made up of letters but made up of the sound composition. And the sound is made up of letters or letter combinations. Pupils master the words by pronunciation and the spelling words.

However, phonics teaching is based on the teaching of English as mother tongue or second language abroad.

But for Chinese pupils, English is a foreign language on the basis of partial strategies of phonics teaching may not be effective. In addition, phonics teaching was put forward as a reading strategy for just a short time. And it did not has wide and deep impact, and there are not much related theoretical construction and empirical research. So over all, phonics teaching has yet to be studied. This thesis reviews the concept of phonics teaching, discusses history of phonics teaching, and specifies the relationship among phonics teaching, phonological awareness and English reading, as well as talks about the researches about phonics teaching at home and abroad, trying to enrich the theoretical information about it.

1.3 Structure of the Study

This thesis consists of five parts.

The first part introduces the background, purpose and significance. It analyzes that pupils lack phonological awareness, find difficulties in spelling and reading because of English teachers’ lack of phonological awareness, tensions on curriculum arrangement and deformity of the purpose of teaching and other issues. Thus it shows that there is the tendency to ignore pronunciation and spelling training in primary school English teaching in our country. Then it puts forward the view that we should use phonics teaching to cultivate pupils’ phonological awareness and help pupils to establish correspondence between the sounds and the form of the words.

The second part reviews the concept of phonics, the history and definition of phonics teaching. It specifies the relationship among phonics, phonological awareness and English reading and states three theoretical basis: the reading development phase theory and mother language transfer theory; at the same time traces back the researches at home and abroad. 自然拼读法促进小学生英语阅读能力的实证研究(3):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_45274.html