2. Literature Review 2

2.1 Phonics 2

2.2 Theoretical Framework 2

2.2.1 The Critical Period Hypothesis 2

2.2.2 Language Transfer 2

2.2.3 Theory of Children’s Cognitive Development 3

2.3 Studies Abroad and at Home 3

2.3.1 Related Study of Phonics Abroad 3

2.3.2 Related study of Phonics at Home 4

3. Research Design 5

3.1 Research Questions 5

3.2 Subjects 5

3.3 Instruments 5

3.3.1 Tests 5

3.3.2 Class Observation 5

3.3.3 Questionnaires 6

3.3.4 Interview 6

4. Results and Discussion 7

4.1 Results and discussion of tests 7

4.2 Analysis and discussion of observation 7

4.3 Results and discussion of questionnaires 7

4.4 Analysis of interview 10

4.5 Summary of the results and discussions 10

5. Conclusion 11

5.1 Findings 11

5.2 Limitations 11

References 12

Appendix I 13

Appendix II 14

Appendix III 15

1. Introduction

1.1 Background of the study

    Recently, owing to the globalization of the whole world, English is becoming more and more important as an international language. There are 45 countries regarding English as their first language and one-third of the population talking in English. As we all know, vocabulary is the basis of English learning but many pupils think it’s too difficult to learn. Most of them think that vocabulary is a tough issue for them and the words teaching method carried out by their English teachers are quite boring. And the most common method for teaching English pronunciation is IPA (International Phonetic Alphabets) which is hard for pupils to acquire. 

But during my practicum in Hangzhou Greentown Yuhua Primary school, I found students there learn words easier because they were taught by the method of phonics. Besides，phonics instruction can inspire pupil’s learning interest. Phonics was proposed by scholars from United States in 1790s and it has become popular since the 1990s. It involves teaching children to connect the sounds of spoken English with letters or groups of letters and teaching them to blend the sounds of letters together to produce approximate pronunciations of unknown words( MaJing, 2012). Using this method, teachers need to provide students with the information about rules and patterns of phonics. And owing to the successes of phonics in the countries whose first language are English, a number of Chinese scholar also start to do researches on this method and want to introduce it to some primary schools in our country. It has been widely used in Hongkong and Taiwan, especially in some private training institutions. However, the number of researches with phonics in the mainland of China is still small and this method is seldom used by English teachers to teach new words by now. This is the reason why I decided to choose phonics as my topic of my research to check whether it can help pupils to learn vocabulary much easier and promote their interest.  自然拼读法在小学英语教学中的运用(2):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_49940.html