Exploring The Effects Of Explicitness Of Instruction: Learning English Grammatical Features Of "the" By Chinese EFL Beginners

The major premise of the present investigation is Schmidt's Noticing Hypothesis (Schmidt, 1990), which claims that noticing is the necessary and sufficient condition for converting input into intake. Schmidt (1990, 1993) has argued that conscious awareness of form at the level of noticing is necessary to subsequent second language development and that consciousness at the level of rule awareness is strongly facilitative of subsequent learning.Compared with the substantial research on attention to form in ESL contexts, relatively little research has been conducted in EFL contexts. Therefore, this thesis is an attempt to examine the effects of formal attention to from with different degrees of explicitness, which were manipulated through different attention-drawing devices (i.e. explicit rule explanation along with visual input enhancement vs. visual input enhancement only), on the learning of the target grammatical features of the English definite article"the"in EFL contexts like a context in which Chinese serves as the native language. Specifically, the study addresses: (1) Do differences in the degree of explicitness manipulated through different attention-drawing devices differently affect the learning of the target grammatical features regarding the definite article"the"? (2) Do differences in the degree of explicitness in which the target form is presented differently affect the level of awareness raised under the three different treatment conditions as measured by the number of correct responses (correct error identifications and explanations) in the grammaticality judgment test? (3) Does the level of awareness developed by learners during the treatment sessions correlate positively with the learning effects of the target grammatical features? (4) Does the treatment of visual input enhancement promote the learning of the target features?Participants were 69 Chinese beginning learners of English,who were divided into two treatment groups and one control group. The learning target– the definite article"the", was embedded in two treatment tasks: a sentence training task and a passage training task. The sentence training task, which contained 16 sentences of four groups with each sentence group respectively addressing one grammatical rule governing the definite article, was presented to each of the three participating groups through three different degrees of explicitness, which were the result of combining the factors [+/- Explicit Rule Explanation] and [+/- Visual Input Enhancement]. The passage training...