An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Input Enhancement And Output Task On The Noticing Of English Passive Voice

This paper aims to study the effects of input enhancement and output task on the noticing of English passive voice. Sharwood Smith's Input Enhancement Theory and Swain's Comprehensible Output Hypothesis are regarded as two major important theories in Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Both input and output are crucial to learners'acquisition of the target language forms. There are lots of studies concerning this point based on the theories of input enhancement and output separately. There are few studies about the collaborative effects of these two theories.What's more, there is a link between input and output. That is Noticing. According to Schmidt (1990), during the process from input to output there is a vital element called—"Noticing". Besides, Swain also put forward three functions of output. One of them is called the noticing function. Thus, the importance of noticing is self-evident.This thesis will focus on whether input enhancement and output will improve the noticing of English passive voice. The following three questions will be answered during the study:1) Does input enhancement improve the noticing of passive voice? 2) Does output task (text reconstruction) promote the noticing of passive voice? 3) Does the combination of input enhancement and output task have active effects on the noticing of passive voice?Based on these three questions, the author puts forward three hypotheses as follows:Hypothesis 1:The subjects who are exposed to the enhanced input will better notice the target form than those only reading the unenhanced input material.Hypothesis 2:The subjects who are asked to finish the output task (text reconstruction) will notice the target form to the larger extent than those only finishing the usual reading comprehension questions.Hypothesis 3:The effects of the input enhancement and output task will collaboratively improve the noticing of the target form better than individually.Finally, these three hypotheses are all supported by the present study's experimental data. So, the conclusion can be drawn like this:input enhancement and output, separately and collaboratively, can promote learners' noticing of the linguistic form --- passive voice. What's more important, the collaborative effect outperforms the separate effect.