Status, Challenges, Andstrategies of Phonics Instruction in Thecentral Regionofchina

Abstract

Phonics is a teaching method used to guide students to directly learn the pronunciation rules of 26 letters and letter combinations in words by emphasizing the name sounds of letters to establish the connection between letters and letter combinations with pronunciation to achieve the ability to read words when they see them and understand the words when they hear them. This method can reduce the difficulty of English learning for elementary students. To explore relationship among the status, challenges and strategies, the research made a questionnaire which was conducted in the central region of China-Henna Province, and 457 English teachers from 20 public primary schools and ten private elementary schools were randomly selected as participants. It was found that status of teachers' overall perception with efficient phonics instruction is relatively high, but challenges resulted from traditional teaching methods and the lacking of updated teaching resources led to students' inefficient learning results. A highly significant correlation has been illustrated among the three variables When Grouped According to Profile. The better the status is, the less challenges teachers encountered, the more challenges exist, the more strategies are accepted.