The possibility of growing crystallographically aligned films of good quality on polycrystalline or amorphous substrates is of great interest, both for fundamental understanding of film growth mechanisms, and for potential applications such as buffer layers for silicon-on-insulator devices and an epitaxial transition layer for cuprate superconductor thin films grown on substrates with large misfits. Deposition conditions for yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) thin films were investigated and optimized, and highly (001) oriented YSZ films were reproducibly prepared on amorphous substrates by MOCVD. We believe that the formation of a highly oriented crystalline film on an amorphous substrate can be interpreted in terms of the inherent features of MOCVD process, and a working model of this process is suggested.