As for English teachers in Grade 5 in primary schools, they will face a same problem: How to teach students spell English words more effectively? To solve the problem, this study aims to explore whether phonics is an effective way for Grade Five students to recite new words and whether it could be accepted by students。

In the study, the author attempts to discuss whether Phonics can improve students’ word spelling ability through the comparative teaching experiment between the experimental class and the control class。 Besides, an interview after the experiment will be given to probe whether phonics is acceptable。

To sum up, the present study aims to research the effectiveness of phonics and help teachers and students to find a better way to improve vocabulary spelling ability。

1。2。2 The Significance of the Study

The ELT editor and teacher trainer Craig Wright said that “As a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, so the journey of learning English begins with Phonics。” It shows the importance of phonics for English learning。 Furthermore, this research focuses on the theoretical significance and practical significance of phonics。 

On one hand, it can enrich the theoretical knowledge through the literature and the experience of using phonics by learning phonics home and abroad。 Besides, this thesis can provide more data and experiment for further study about it。

On the other hand, there is less experiment about phonics than document researches in China。 Therefore, this thesis can give English teachers more suggestions on using phonics to teach vocabulary instead of repetition。

1。3 The Organization of the Thesis

This thesis mainly consists of the following five chapters:

Chapter one is the introduction of the thesis, which generally introduces the background, the significance and purpose of research, and finally presents the structure of the thesis。 

Chapter two is the literature review of the study, including the basic concept of phonics that consists of its definition and history of phonics, some relevant theories and researches on phonics at home and abroad。

Chapter three states the methodology。 In this part the author puts forward the main research questions, the subjects, the instruments, and the procedure and data collection。

Chapter four presents the results and data analysis of the research according to the collected data obtained from the statistics analysis。 

Chapter five will give out the major findings of the study in vocabulary teaching。 Finally the author points out the limitations of the present and provides opinions and suggestions for further research。

 2。 Literature Review

2。1 The History of Phonics

As Chen (2011) claimed, phonics originated from the Roman text “The Doctrine of Littera”, which described that a letter consisted of a sound, a written symbol and a name。 In her opinion, the major meaning of phonics is the relationship between word sound and form。 

However, in 16th century, phonics is a way of teaching reading through understanding the pronunciation of letters and groups of letters which could track back to Catholic Church。 At that time, the Bible was translated into English to make all the believers understand。 Therefore, phonics, an easy way of learning English, was invented。

Then, it comes to 1790s in which phonics was widely applied in American reading instruction for religion。 But, the whole-word method was advocated by Horace Mann and quickly became popular from the late 1930s to 1940s。