1.2 Significance of the Study
Memorizing words can be very important when children learn the second language in the environment of lacking natural language acquisition. As we all know, words are the foundations of effective communication. It is important for teachers to know how children should learn words and how they can learn words effectively. And the teaching method “phonics instruction” which is quite popular abroad may partly help children learn words better. However, the teaching experience of phonics abroad are mostly based on the mother tongue, so the phonics instruction may not be suitable for teaching English in China. On the basis of the appropriate theories and the study of the existing achievements, the writer will make a further research on the practice of phonics in the elementary English vocabulary teaching for the purpose of enriching the theory of phonics and finding out its feasibility and effectiveness in China. What’s more, the writer will also look for the possible problems accompanied by phonics teaching and cast about for solutions to them.
2. Literature Review
2.1 Phonics
When we talk about the definition of phonics, different scholars often have different viewpoints.According to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Phonics refers to a way of teaching reading through understanding the pronunciation of letters and groups of letters. And to some other scholars, It is a method for teaching English reading or writing by developing children’s phonemic awareness so as to teach the correspondence between these sounds and the spelling patterns that represent them.Adams (1990) mentioned that “phonics refers to a system of teaching reading that builds the alphabetic principle, a system of which a central component is the teaching of correspondences between letters or groups of letters and their pronunciations.” Hodges and Harris (1995) defined phonics as a way of teaching reading and spelling that stress symbol-sound relationships.According to Artley (1996:11),"phonics is merely one of several methods that child may use to unlock words.” Stahl (2002: 335) regard phonics as "any approach in which the teacher does/ says to help children learn how to decode words." To sum up, nearly all these definitions regard the phonics as letter-sound relationships.
2.2 Theoretical Framework
2.2.1 The Critical Period Hypothesis
The critical period hypothesis was first proposed by the famous neurologist Wilder Penfield and co-author Lamar Roberts in their 1959 book Speech and Brain Mechanisms. Later, it was popularized by Eric Lenneberg (1967) according to his study of children’s brains as well adults’ brains. In his study, he found that language is the product of brain development and the development of language ability is restricted by the person’s physiological basis. Then he suggested that there is a critical period (from infancy to puberty, i.e. age 2 to 13) in language learning and argued that only in this period can people has plasticity and the language acquisition also come about easily and naturally. After this period, it is difficult to successfully acquire a kind of language overcoming the accent because nearly all people’s brains has been mature. This hypothesis also has been supported by a great many theories and findings.
The critical period hypothesis has provided an important theoretical basis for the application of phonics in elementary English teaching. The phonics instructions are confirm to the elementary students’ law of physical development.
2.2.2 Language Transfer
Language transfer refers to writers or speakers applying knowledge from one language to another. It can also be pided into two parts: positive transfer and negative transfer. The positive transfer occurs when the relevant unit or structure of two languages are the same, then the linguistic interference can lead to correct language production. So if the relevant unit or structure of both language are different, then it could be called as negative transfer. The language transfer plays an essential part in English learning because it suggests that people are able to get experiences and knowledge to future learning. 自然拼读法在小学英语教学中的运用(3):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_49940.html