Empirical Study On Orthographic Cipher Improving Junior High School Students' Phonological Processing Ability

From the end of the 20th century, the term of phonological processing ability has attracted great attention of researchers and how to English learners'phonological processing ability has been a hot discussion topic, however, these studies were mainly focused on young native English speakers. There are few researches were conducted among adults or teenagers learners of EFL This study is to investigate the effectiveness of training and instructions based on orthographic cipher on phonological processing ability, especially the abilities of decoding and encoding among 144 Chinese Grade two students in junior high school. There are two research questions to be investigated:1. Can phonological processing ability be improved through training at junior high school level? and 2. Does training based on orthographic cipher affect students' decoding and encoding abilities at junior high school level?An experimental group of 74 Chinese Grade two students in Beijing Yuying Junior High School received training and instructions based on orthographic cipher in order to improve their phonological processing ability. This group was then compared to a parallel control group of 70 students of same Grade which did not receive any training and instruction. The two groups received the same tests before and after the training period. Both pretest and posttest included the following phonological processing ability tasks:blending phonemes, segmenting phonemes and pseudo words reading. The results showed that, after instructions and training based on orthographic cipher, the experimental group improved significantly in the performance on phonological processing ability, especially the abilities of decoding and encoding, while control group did not.This research also attempted to investigate the participants' reaction and attitudes to the role of phonological processing ability played in their English study. From the questionnaire it was found that the phonological processing ability does great help in reading and English learning.Results of co-relational analysis reveal that phonological processing ability can be improved through training based on orthographic cipher and the training did great benefit on students' decoding and encoding abilities at junior high school level.