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AbstractThis study using SAPA and spelling test among the experimental groups and the controlled groups to assess the English phonological awareness and spelling performance of primary school students in grade 3 and grade 5. The study aims to illustrate the development features of phonological awareness in Chinese primary school L2 learners, the effect of phonological awareness intervention, and the correlation between phonological awareness intervention and English spelling performance. The conclusions of the study are: the phonological awareness intervention training has positive influence on English phonological awareness and a positive correlation was found between phonological awareness and English spelling performance.Key Words: phonological awareness; spelling ability; phonological awareness intervention摘要本研究运用SAPA和单词拼写测试，对小学三年级和五年级学生的英语语音意识和英语单词拼写情况进行评估。本文旨在考察中国以英语为第二外语的小学生，其英语语音意识的发展特点，语音意识干预活动的效果及英语语音意识干预活动与单词拼写情况的相关性。实验结果表明：英语语音干预活动对语音意识有积极影响，并且干预活动对单词拼写有积极作用，英语语音意识和英语单词拼写情况呈现正相关。关键词：语音意识；拼写能力；语音意识干预5.2The Correlation Between Phonological Awareness Intervention and English Spelling.146.Conclusion 14Bibliography 16A Study of Phonological Awareness Intervention in Primary School Students English Spelling1. IntroductionRecent developments in the field of educational psychology have led to an increasing interest in phonological awareness, which denotes an individuals awareness of the phonological structure, or sound structure, of words (Gillon21). A great number of relevant researches indicate that phonological awareness plays an important role in language acquisition, especially in reading ability and lexical acquisition. Thus, numerous researchers and educators have put these theories into practice. In many western countries, where people use English as their mother tongue, the phonological awareness training has been valued as an indispensable part in childrens English teaching. Also, vast majority of experiment researches prefer to put focus on the relationship between reading and phonological awareness in learning English language as the first language.However, compared with reading ability, spelling ability is more challenging for foreign language learners to acquire. And as an essential yet tricky task for the beginners, learning new words and further memorizing them sometimes can be a long-term obstacle in their further study. Due to the obsolete way of memorizing, such as copying down these new words for hundreds of times,some of the students lose their interest in learning English. And some of them feel helpless and hopeless towards their pronunciations and spellings just because they keep making the same mistake in the same word. So it is necessary for teachers to provide efficient vocabulary teaching strategy, and phonological awareness, the author deems, may be a feasible breakthrough point. So this study has the following objectives: to conduct an empirical study of the effect of phonological awareness on Chinese students English spelling in primary school; and to investigate the preferable stage of primary school in phonological awareness intervention.This thesis is divided into six parts. The first part serves as an overall introduction to the background, significance and aim of the study. The second part is an overview of the theories and studies related to phonological awareness and spelling in EFL learners, especially in young children. The third part describes the experimental design in detail, including issues and hypothesis, sample, instruments, and procedures. In the fourth part the result of this experiment will be presented in detail. The fifth part is mainly about the experimental discussion. The sixth part is devoted to the conclusion in which the author will put forward the major findings and the implications of the study.2. Literature ReviewIn this part, the author will briefly introduce the overview of spelling. Then the theories and researches of phonological awareness will then be presented.2.1 Overview of Spelling ResearchAccording to the alphabetic principle, spelling is regarded as transcriptions of the sounds of spoken language. It is a linguistic process of phonemic orthography (correct writing) with the necessary letters and diacritics presented in a comprehensible order, usually with standardization to a certain extent; it is “the conventions which determine how the graphemes of a writing system are used to write a language” (Coulmas 12). According to McCrackens, spelling is deemed to an essential writing skill, which is regarded as a memorization of letter combinations by students who are used to learning new words by repeating practice by rote (22). A number of EFL learners tend to practice their spelling skills in a traditional even rigid way. They grab the book and stare at the target word then spell it out letter by letter repeatedly until they can correctly recite the spelling. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of vocabularies needed to be memorized will be misspelled or even be forgotten after a couple of weeks. The significance of phonological awareness towards spelling development is recognized. Actually, spelling is a certain skill and is obtained through effective teaching and valid practice (McCrackens 25).In previous peoples point of view, spelling is esteemed as an exercise in visual memorization,but it is now considered as a language-based skill, in which knowledge of the speech structure of spoken language isan important component (Gillon 35).In order to learn spelling effectively, children in elementary school need to go through some certain stages. There are five stages as Gentry described in his research: pre-communicative stage, semi-phonetic stage, phonetic stage, transitional stage and correction stage (193-196).Firstly, in the pre-communicative stage, the young learners use letters having no idea about the letter-sound correspondences. At the same time, some of them may also lack full knowledge of English letters, discrimination of upper-case and lower-case letters, and the correct direction of English orthography.Next one is semi-phonetic stage. In this phase, the young learners start to get to know the correspondence of sound with a certain letter or monograph, or in other words, they begin to realize the grapheme-phoneme rules. They also have the basic ability of logic inference, for example,using only one letter to take place of a word, a sound and a syllable (e.g. U for you).The third one is phonetic stage. Even though some young children may make some mistakes in conventional English spelling, they can use a letter or group of letters to express every sound they heard. They have the basic command of primary grapheme-phoneme rules that can be easily spelled or recognized, for example, they use “KOM” for “come”.Then, in the fourth stage, the transitional stage, learners start to replace the conventional alternatives by expressing sounds, changing a dependency of sound to the structure of words and vocabulary spelling connected with vision and audition. For instance, they use “EGUL” for “eagle”.The last stage is correct stage. The learners possess the elementary knowledge of English orthography. The students in this phase can deal with things like prefixes and suffixes, mute consonants, alternative spellings and irregular spellings. With an increasing number of vocabularies they accumulate, the learners can identify misspelled words. Childrens comprehension about spelling rules and other special cases is generally correction.Gentry states that each stage is based on the former one and the stage changes gradually (198).2.2 Overview of Phonological Awareness ResearchThe definition of phonological awareness varies, due to the domain and matters which researchers study in. Oakhill and Kyle believe that phonological awareness is a kind of ability with which learners are able to detect, recognize and manipulate the letters or phrase (i.e. syllables, rhymes and phonemes) (43). Tunmer thinks that phonological awareness is the response and control ability to the phonemic segments in language (419). Shankeiler and Crain deem that phonological awareness is a metalinguistic ability and it is the foundation of the phoneme structure. Morais, Alegria and Content hold the idea that phonological awareness contains the awareness both in phonemes and syllables (17). Torgesen and Mathes define it as peoples sensitivity to the phonological structure of vocabularies (qtd. in Zhang 15). And Gillonde notes that it is an individuals awareness of the phonological structure, or sound structure, of spoken words (21).Also, there are different levels of phonological awareness, as Gillon claimed. He deems that phonological awareness is a multilevel skill of disassemble vocabularies into smaller units and characterize it in the light of three levels: syllable awareness, onset-rime awareness and phoneme awareness (31).There are different ways to measure diverse linguistic units of phonological awareness. For instance, syllable awareness is generally measured with many activities such as syllable tapping, syllable blending, syllable completion, syllable identity and syllable deletion. In the case of onset-rime awareness, learners can be tested by following tasks including word-to-word matching, rhyme oddity, rhyme judgement and rhyme generation or production. As for phoneme awareness, researchers will use tasks such as phoneme counting, phoneme matching and phoneme isolation to assess the degree of learners sensitivity to the linguistic units of phonological awareness (qtd. in Zhang 8).While Cassady et al. coined another set of measurement, standardized assessment of phonological awareness. They use SASP, including rhyming task, oddity detection task, blending task, segment task and phonemic manipulation task, to evaluate phonological awareness (9-10).Gillon points out two ways of phonological awareness intervention that is skill mastery approach and integrated multiple-skill approach. First is the skill mastery approach. Children will be taught a certain phonemic level skill for each time until they can grasp it. After imparting the first skill, the teacher will then introduce the next skill such as phoneme segmentation. With respect to integrated multiple-skill approach, varied skills will become one flesh and be imparted at the same time. For instance, blending, segmentation and manipulation skills are tackled synchronously (25-28).Ehri indicated that the phonological awareness intervention had better concentrate on one or two skills in each time. Through the skill mastery approach, the abilities of spelling and reading can be improved better (24).A large number of observations about phonological awareness intervention in western native speakers have achieved impressive results. Jillian M. Castle made experimental studies of the phonological awareness intervention effect on spelling and reading. Subjects of this experiment were all children who were five years old. After more than ten weeks intervention, the result was impressive. The spelling and reading performance of experimental group was much better than that of control group (352-354). Researchers, such as Wolfgang Schneider et al., have compared different schemes of phonological awareness intervention, which was towards young children at risk of reading and spelling disorder. The testees were divided into three groups: sound-alphabet training group, phonological awareness training group and integrated multiple-skill training group. The result indicated that compared with single unit training, integrated training achieved more prominent effect (qtd. in Zhi 28).Compared with western countries, China put less attention to phonological awarenessbecause the traditional English teaching in China prefer to mainly emphasize the grammar, ignoring the importance of systematic phonological teaching and training. Until recent decades, the domestic researchers have been focusing on the effect of phonological awareness. Xu, Dong, Yang and Wang made the study that conducted both cross-sectional and short-term longitudinal experiments to inquiry the situation of English phonological awareness in Chinese elementary school students. They found that different units of English phonological awareness had varied development levels, from high to low, of rhyming awareness, end-phonemic awareness, onset awareness and phonemic awareness. Also, they claimed that this tendency lasted from grade one to grade five (222).Liu and Dong pointed out that there was a close relationship between English phonological awareness and English word reading inChinese primary school children (962). Li, Guan, Tao and Dong analyzed the development and features of English phonological awareness of Chinese young children. The results revealed that English phonological awareness is improved with the growth of young learner (1364). Li and Dong investigated the influence of English phonological awareness in first grade junior high school students; and they found that the training of phonological awareness distinctly improved students phonological awareness and reading ability, especially for the students who had reading difficulties (62).From the literatures mentioned above, the effectiveness of English phonological awareness can be shown clearly. The influence of English phonological awareness intervention in spelling and reading among the native speakers is impressive, as western researcher and educators demonstrated distinctly. While the domestic studies of the influence English phonological awareness, especially towards English spelling (because the majority of experiment researches prefer to put focus on the relationship between reading and phonological awareness), need to be further explored. Whats more, the approaches of memorizing and spelling English vocabulary are stereotyped, writing down or reciting letters over and over again, or learning through reading materials which is better than last one though. Students even and teachers make light of the effect of phonological awareness. Therefore, the author carries out an experimental study of phonological awareness intervention in primary school students English spelling.3. Experimental DesignIn this part, the methodology for this study generally refers to research issues and hypothesis, research samples, research instruments and research procedures respectively.3.1 Issues and HypothesisTo be specific, this study is designed to investigate the effect of phonological awareness intervention in Chinese primary school students English spelling and to clarify the relationship between phonological awareness and spelling performance. According to the theories and previous studies uncovered by foreign and domestic researchers, the author, therefore, put forward the following hypotheses: the phonological awareness intervention training has positive influence on English phonological awareness; there is a positive correlation between phonological awareness and spelling for Chinese primary school students, that is to say, childrens spelling ability will improve after the phonological awareness intervention.3.2 Research SamplesThis study was conducted in Zhonghualu Elementary School from October in 2016 to January 2017. Considering the operability of the study, students in Grade One and Grade Two were not required to formally memorize or spell English words, and students in Grade Six were busying at the eleven-plus, also the gap of English ability was not that obvious, so these testees were all from Grade Three and Grade Five.There were altogether 270 Chinese students involved in this study. The author set Class 1 Grade 3 and Class 1 Grade 5 as the experimental groups, and regarded Class 2 Grade 3 and Class 2 Grade 5 as the controlled groups. The total number of testees in class was 67, 68, 68 and 67 respectively. Among 270 students, the ratio of boys and girls were nearly equal. The mean age of Grade 3 was 8.4 and the mean age of Grade 5 was 12.6. All the testees spoke English as the foreign language. Also, the English proficiency average levels of each class from the same grade were almost the same.3.3 Research InstrumentsIn order to characterize the features of phonological awareness of Chinese primary school students, the instrument of SAPA (Standardized Assessment of Phonological Awareness) coined by Cassady et al. was used in the experiment (12). The intervention material took examples by Zhis experimental study (79-90). The material contained 16 units, involving 20 vowels and 28 consonants. The character of intervention material was arranged from simple to hard. The samples of each target phoneme were all excerpted from the synchronized textbook given by school. The spelling test was based on the primary school English textbook synchronized with lessons, considering the operability of the experiment and equity towards the controlled group and the experimental group. The statistical analysis software is Microsoft Excel.The study adopts Smith et al. Standardized Assessment of Phonological Awareness, i.e., SAPS to test for the reason that it is one of the more practical and specific ways to analyze the testees phonological awareness, which is based onthe five-stage developmental modelof phonological awareness which explains the developmental characteristics of phonologicalawareness (Adams 15-17). This measure contains separate component tasks, including phonological awareness tasks (rhyme, detect oddity, blending, segment and phonemic control), rhyme awareness (identification and application), order of phonemic (beginning, middle and ending sounds) and blending (onset, body coda and phoneme) (9-12). The diagram of detailed tasks of Standardized Assessment of Phonological Awareness is demonstrated as follows:Diagram 3-1 Standardized Assessment of Phonological AwarenessSAPA contains 14 subsets. The score for each subset is five, so the total score of phonological awareness is 70.3.4Research ProceduresThe experiments were carried out in October 10th, 2016 in Zhonghualu Elementary School in Xianyang city. Class 1 Grade 3 and Class 1 Grade 5were experimental groups, and the other two classes, to be precise, Class 2 Grade 3 and Class 2 Grade 5were controlled groups. Before the experiments, both classes from the same grade had the same English teacher.Firstly, each group is given a pretest by using SAPA to appraise the testees English phonological awareness. The test contains five phases, which are rhyme task (involved two sub-tasks), oddity detection task (involved three sub-tasks), blending task (involved three sub-tasks), segmenting (involved two sub-tasks) and phonemic manipulation task (involved four sub-tasks). The test duration of each task is about 10 to 15 minutes, during which instructions of the task and examples are demonstrated. After the test ofphonological awareness, there is a spelling test (the material is excerpted from the textbook) to appraise the testees spelling situation. Then after the pretests, the intervention training of phonological awareness towards the experimental groups carries on from October, 2016 to January, 2017. The frequency of intervention guidance is twice a week, 45 minutes for each time. Each lesson is performed three to four target phonemes. At first, some teaching letter cards and vocabulary cards are shown to the students, and the familiar words are used to elicit the target sounds and letters then the letter-sound rules are imparted to the students. After these have been done, the students do some exercises and training to enhance the effect of intervention. The controlled groups still keep the normal and natural track at school. At last, the posttests are carried on after the intervention, the author use the same approach to appraise the testees En
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