A Study Of Noticing Function Of Output In Promoting The Acquisition Of Linguistic Forms

In 1985, a Canadian linguist, Merrill Swain, proposed the Comprehensible Output Hypothesis concerning the role of output in second language acquisition (SLA). Based on this hypothesis, Swain elaborated three functions of output, namely, the noticing function, the hypothesis-testing function, and the metalinguistic function.Among the three functions, the author focuses on the noticing function in the thesis. The dozens of experimental studies of the noticing function carried out over the past twenty years have mostly taken past hypothetical conditional in English as the target form. Can it be also effective in promoting the acquisition of other linguistic forms? The present thesis, within the frame of Swain's Comprehensible Output Hypothesis, attempts to conduct an experiment to further explore the effectiveness of the noticing function. Specifically, the experiment attempts to answer the following two questions: 1) Does text reconstruction promote the noticing of the passive voice in English? 2) Does text reconstruction facilitate the acquisition of the passive voice in English? It is hoped that the experimental results can confirm our hypotheses that the experimental group (EG) receiving text reconstruction will show greater noticing and better acquisition of the passive voice than the control group (CG). Consequently, the subjects of EG outperform the subjects of CG in the noticing and acquisition of the passive voice. The findings not only provide some support for the noticing function of output but also bring some implications for College English teaching in China.