For Chinese EFL learners, the skill of vocabulary learning is one of the most essential elements in their English learning process. Many Chinese students transfer their familiar character-learning strategies, which include shape identification and rote memorization, in their English word-learning process. As a result, they may spend time and effort associating the shape, the sound, and the meaning of an English word before they learn and memorize it. Since they do not take advantage of the correspondence between the print and the sound, their vocabulary-learning process seems to be less effective.

This study investigates whether or not instruction of English graphophonic correspondences, i.e., the link between letters and sounds, will help Chinese students in learning English vocabulary. Following other related research, I assume that Chinese students can benefit from instruction of English grapheme-phoneme correspondences in learning English words. If this assumption is true, there should be a statistically significant difference between students who have instruction of English graphophonic correspondences for learning English words and students who do not. 1. Chinese students who have been given lessons in both pronunciation and grapheme-phoneme correspondences will recall more English words on a short-term vocabulary test immediately after a vocabulary learning session than will the students who have been given only the lessons in pronunciation. 2. Chinese students who have been given lessons in both pronunciation and grapheme-phoneme correspondences will also recall more English words on a long-term vocabulary test two weeks after a vocabulary learning session than will the students who have been given ~ the lessons in pronunciation. Two groups of students who are in their second year of a junior college in Taiwan participated in this study. The control group was given the normal English course and pronunciation course which did not include the instruction of any letter-sound relationships. The experimental group was given not only the normal English course and pronunciation practice but also instruction in English graphophonic correspondences. This research examined whether or not the students given explicit instruction in English graphophonic correspondences had better performance on both short-term and long-term vocabulary recall tests after the special instruction. The experimental group recalled more words on both short-term and long-term vocabulary recall tests. Moreover, they behaved differently across time depending on which group they were in: The experimental group's performance continued to progress over time while the control group's performance fluctuated across time. The data collected during the experiment support both hypotheses.