An Experimental Study On Orthographic Cipher For Vocabulary Acquisition In A Senior High School

English is the most widely used language in the world. English vocabulary teaching and learning forms an important part of the teaching and learning of the English language. Relevant data show that vocabulary teaching is inefficient in Chinese middle schools. For example, middle school students in major Chinese cities have learned English for about nine years, but they still have great trouble in reading and spelling words and have not yet grasped the number of words and expressions stipulated by the National English Syllabus, and they are rather poor in the five skills- listening, speaking, reading, writing, and translating. Obviously, vocabulary teaching in Chinese middle schools is both time-consuming and rather inefficient. Taking the present reality of vocabulary acquisition into account, I consider it absolutely essential and very important to discuss and optimize methods for vocabulary teaching in Chinese middle schools.Many researchers put forward the vocabulary learning strategies in aspects of cognitive, meta-cognitive, social or affective strategies, such as the well-known association strategy, picture strategy, context clues strategy etc. But there are few researchers who have worked on the word-decoding strategy which discovers the essence and nature of the English language. About 1500 years ago, what on earth is the code or cipher of making thousands of English words with only 26 simple letters? Therefore, the author here has made an experimental study on Orthographic Cipher---the word-decoding strategy for Vocabulary Acquisition in a Senior High School.The students participating in this experiment are from two classes of Senior One at Nanhai Senior High School in Guangdong Province, one acts as the experimental class adopting Orthographic Cipher and the other acts as the control class without Orthographic Cipher. This is a study of adopting Orthographic Cipher in the experimental class to detect the differences between the two classes in aspects of their competence to read and write words, independent learning and vocabulary acquisition competence; to detect the differences in students'learning interest, motivation and attitude towards vocabulary learning at different levels by means of questionnaires, tests, interviews and observations.After the research on Orthographic Cipher, the main findings are as follows. Firstly, learning Orthographic Cipher Method, students can read and write words automatically and accurately. Both the quantity and the quality of the students'vocabulary knowledge are greatly improved; Secondly, vocabulary acquisition competence of the experimental class is quite better than that of the control class. In the experimental class, students have stronger independent learning and possess higher learning efficiency; Thirdly, Orthographic Cipher does foster students the habit of accumulating vocabulary on their own vocabulary books, develop their language skills and improve their integrative competence; Fourthly, students'interest, motivation and attitude towards vocabulary learning at different levels are improved to different extent. The motivation of the upper and intermediate students has been activated during the process of adopting Orthographic Cipher. And the lower students, who have serious reading disabilities before, now can read and write a word quickly and directly without the reference to a dictionary or the teacher. In this way, they build up stronger confidence and become more interested in learning than the upper and intermediate students. On the whole, most of the students are more independent and more confident in vocabulary learning and become more actively engaged in vocabulary learning activities than before...