A Program Designing of English Pronunciation and Spelling: with Phonics and International Phonetic Alphabet

Phonics introduced from Britain and the United States has caused many educators in China to strongly question the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) teaching method of English pronunciation. At one time, training institutions in the coastal areas of China hanged the "no need to learn IPA symbols anymore" banner, depreciating the IPA symbols, and began their business of training phonics in a big way. But gradually, they found that phonics is not a panacea because English orthography cannot reach the one-to-one grapheme-phoneme correspondences. In fact, the essence of phonics is the spelling rules, and the core of the IPA is phonetic transcription. The comparability between them is very low and they are not exclusive to each other, on the contrary, the two have a good complementarity for non-native speakers. After a long period of research and teaching practice, the author provides a program designing which combines both phonics and IPA symbols for English pronunciation and spelling for non-native speakers in China, and it has been found to be effective in facilitating students' English learning.