Due to the current situation, a method called phonics becomes popular during recent years, which was originated in America in 1790s and became popular in 1990s in western countries to train and improve children's comprehension. Hsu (2000) not only viewed phonics as the knowledge about the letter-sound correspondence relationship, but also regarded phonics as a part of pronunciation teaching.

The letter-sound correspondences provided by phonics can help learners infer the spelling form a word’s pronunciation and decode the pronunciation from the written form of a word. And once Ss grasp the phonetic rules of the word, they can remember the spelling and pronunciation of it spontaneously and will naturally remember all the words which share the same rule. 

Since the turn of the 20th century phonics has been widely used in primary education and in teaching literacy throughout the English-speaking world. At present, academics and teachers in China are trying to introduce English spelling teaching method and doing some corresponding experimental studies. However, the study about phonics on the mainland of China (except Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao) is still on the way and few systematic researches have been done. Though it has been proved by many educators that phonics instruction is an effective instruction in learning English, especially in vocabulary learning and improving reading ability, there are few researches and papers about whether phonics is suitable in China’s elementary English classroom or whether phonics helps primary school students’ pronunciation. And most of the phonics teaching abroad aims at the people who learn English as their mother tongue, so some teaching methods may be different from teaching English as a foreign language in China. Thus, what are the characteristics of phonetic teaching based on phonics in China? And researching these questions will be helpful to our future phonetic teaching. 

1.3 The Layout of the Thesis

This thesis consists of five chapters.

Chapter One gives a general introduction to why I choose this topic and the significance of the research. It also contains the layout of this thesis.

Chapter Two presents a general introduction to phonics, including the definition of phonics, the different phonics approaches and studies of phonics abroad and home. What’s more, it contains the theoretical basis for why we use phonics in primary school. 

Chapter Three raises two research questions. The subjects and procedures of the study are illustrated in this chapter.

Chapter Four presents the analysis and discussion based on the data collected in the experiment. 

Chapter Five is a conclusion part about some major findings of this thesis. Which also points out some limitations of this research.