A Study On The Role Of Output In Promoting The Acquisition Of Linguistic Forms

It has been argued that output is nothing more than a sign of the second language acquisition that has already taken place, and that output serves no useful role in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) except possibly as one source of (self-) input to the learner (Krashen 1989). And as a result, the role of output in second language learning had not attracted great interests of researchers and scholars until Swain put forward her Output Hypothesis in 1985.Since then, the output hypothesis has occupied an undeniable place in SLA literature because her criticism of the input hypothesis is based on solid observation. The output hypothesis claims that learners need the opportunity for meaningful use of their linguistic resources to achieve full grammatical competence. Swain (1995) also argues that, under some circumstances, output stimulates language acquisition by forcing the learners to process language syntactically. In particular, the activity of producing the target language may, under certain circumstances, facilitate noticing of the target linguistic forms contained in the subsequently provided input, and finally results in the acquisition of the target forms.In teaching English as a foreign language, learners' output (i.e. speaking and writing in English) is an important aspect. However, output practice has not been given sufficient weight in relation to input practice. Even if the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) has been taken as one important approach in classroom teaching, of which negotiated meaning is the primary focus, learners demonstrate weaknesses in grammatical accuracy and collocation appropriateness in speaking and writing, despite gaining high-level communicative fluency. So we have to think about the role of output in the acquisition of linguistic forms again. Based on the output hypothesis, this thesis attempts to make an empirical study of the effects of output on promoting noticing and second language acquisition. Specifically, this study will examine the effectiveness of an output practice, i.e.,Chinese-to-English translation, on promoting noticing and acquisition of a type of grammatical form, i.e., lexical phrases, hoping that the results of this study will provide some support for the noticing function of output proposed by Swain (1995) and important pedagogical implications for our foreign language teaching. Consequently, not only did the findings of the research confirm the hypothesis set at the beginning predicting that the experimental group (EG) would show greater noticing of the target forms than the control group (CG), but also the findings of the research confirmed the hypothesis predicting that the EG would show greater acquisition of the lexical phrases than the CG. The unique effects of output in promoting noticing and acquisition of the target linguistic forms therefore were confirmed in this study.This thesis consists of five chapters, including an introduction and a conclusion before and after the main body respectively.The introduction provides some preliminaries for the thesis. After discussing the problems to be solved in this study, it explains the purpose and significance of the study and also its limitations. Finally, a general outline of the thesis has been made.The starting point of Chapter 2 is an account of the theoretical rationales for the present study. It goes on to present studies done abroad and at home respectively. At last, it points out the limitations of prior studies and finally proves the necessity of the present research.Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 constitute the main part of this study. In Chapter 3, the procedure of the experiment is presented in detail, including the introduction of the research questions and research hypotheses, the participants, and the target forms to be studied and the detailed description of the treatment, interview questions, and the testing instruments. Chapter 4 is the results and discussion about the experiment. It has been argued that the results of this study provide support for the output hypothesis.Chapter 5 presents the implications of the study for English teaching. And...