A Study Of The Effects Of Noticing On Non-English Major's Subjunctive Mood Acquisition

Since the beginning of 1980s, there has been a long-existing phenomenon in the field of foreign language research and teaching that language input has been attached to great importance, while language output fails to get enough attention. This is closely related to the great impact of Krashen's "Input theory". However, with the development of SLA, more problems began to emerge. In the year, 1985, Swain pointed out that only depending upon the role of input is not enough for the language learners to master target language accurately and fluently. Successful language learners require both input and also output. In the 1990s, Schmidt proposed the Noticing Hypothesis which has great influence on the Second Language Acquisition. In the noticing hypothesis, Schmidt indicates that "Intake is that part of the input that the learner notices".According to Swain, language output has three functions: (1) the noticing/ triggering function, (2) the hypothesis testing function (3) the meta-linguistic (reflective) function. The noticing/triggering function occurs when learners are attempting to produce the second language and they consciously notice that there are holes in their knowledge which is the important foundation for the target language acquisition and performance.The present study, based on the theoretical framework of the Noticing Hypothesis and the Output Hypothesis, aims to investigate the effect of noticing on subjunctive mood acquisition. The 72 sophomores participated in the present study, and were arranged into two experimental groups and one control group.One experimental group was instructed by the multi-media method during which video-clip watching, songs and flash, jokes etc were conducted in order to raise the students' noticing, while the other experimental group was taught by the traditional grammar teaching method. The control group had no treatment. The results show that students' variation in noticing to the target language because of the different teaching methods. Moreover, participants who had more noticing than the control group demonstrate greater improvement of the target language output.