自然拼读法在小学语音教学中的应用(3)

菜单

Last semester the author worked as an intern in Xuejun Primary School where she taught English at Grade 4. During the phonetic class, she found something interesting that the method her tutor using differed to hers. When the author was at Grade 4, she learned English through IPA which was very difficult. So sometimes she would use her own phonetic symbols to learn English. That is to use some Chinese words to help her remember some English words, such as "good morning" — “鼓得摸拧”. But Ss here, their books were clear and they didn’t use these kinds of symbols. Well, her tutor told her that IPA was no longer used in phonetic teaching and a new method called phonics became popular among primary schools since 2011. Now the material for English phonetic teaching in primary school has been reformed and students in Zhejiang are learning pronunciation by phonics. From above we can know that phonics plays an important role in phonetic learning in primary schools. But what is it? Where does it from? Why do we use it? How it works？

So in order to find out the answers, the author is going to do a research based on those questions. This paper will research on the application of phonics to English phonetic teaching in primary school, mainly on two questions — Can the use of phonetic teaching method based on phonics help students’ pronunciation? And what are the characteristics of phonetic teaching based on phonics in Xuejun Primary School?

1.2 The Significance of the Research

Language is composed of three parts, including pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar and pronunciation is the first step to learn a language. "Pronunciation is the essence and material shell of a language and also the foundation of language teaching" ( Zhang Jianzhong, 1997:337). And A.C.Gimson mentioned in his An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English (1908): In order to speak any language, one needs to learn almost 100% of its pronunciation, 50%-90% of its grammar and about 1% of its vocabulary. So in order to cultivate Ss’ basic skills such as listening, speaking, reading and writing, the pronunciation is the first problem to be solved. The starting point of phonetic teaching is that Ss can master the pronunciation and spelling rules correctly by themselves (without the help of teacher). However, conventional English pronunciation teaching (IPA) which only focuses on mechanical imitation from teachers and tapes has ignored the internal relationship between sounds and letters. Learners have to memorize the pronunciations of each word inpidually and separately, which is not very efficient for phonetic learning. There are some students even write Chinese characters to show the pronunciations of English words. In China, many students who have already been trained with phonetic symbols from IPA are still playing guessing games in all kinds of English pronunciation tests, because they are not sure about the spelling of the words and their pronunciations. What’s more, to remember all the phonetic symbols will be a big burden for primary school students. As a result, Ss are unable to read English words without the help of teachers or tapes, let alone speak with others in English clearly. No wonder "dumb English" is so common among Chinese students. It is not surprising to find that Ss cannot reach the goals set in National English Curriculum Standards (2011), which focuses on the teaching goals, especially the language knowledge. The lower-grade students are required to read 26 English letters correctly, to master simple spelling rules and to know how to learn vocabulary according to sounds, forms and meanings.

Therefore the curriculum reformation of China's elementary school has brought new challenges to teachers who constantly reform and try new methods, through which Ss can cultivate a good habit of phonetics and intonation to lay a good basis for their English learning. The teaching of English pronunciation in primary school has been largely improved in recent years. However, the improvement is still far from enough. It is still normal for us to find students who get high mark in the tests can hardly communicate in English.