The Effects Of Input Enhancement On Chinese College English Learners' Noticing Of The Targeted Linguistic Forms

In SLA literature, since Schmidt proposed Noticing Hypothesis, more and more researchers began to pay attention to the effect of noticing on SLA. Then we witnessed substantial studies that attempt to draw learners' attention to specific linguistic form in the input. Input enhancement, as an external attention-drawing device, was coded by Sharwood Smith and now has aroused many researchers' interests. But in China, studies on input enhancement are very few. Therefore, it is of theoretical and realistic significance to make a study from that point of view. This study investigates the potentially facilitative effects of input enhancement on learners' noticing of the targeted linguistic forms. Specifically, the study addresses three research questions: (1) Would the noticing of the target forms in the input be greater for the subjects receiving rule explanation than for the subjects without receiving rule explanation? (2)Would the noticing of the target forms in the input be greater for the subjects receiving enhanced input than for those receiving unenhanced input? (3) Would the noticing of the target forms in the input be greater for the +R+IE subjects than for the +R-IE subjects and the -R+IE subjects?These questions were examined in a controlled experimental study in which the receiving of rule explanation and exposure to enhanced input were systematically varied. Forty-eight university-level students learning English as a foreign language were involved in the experiment. They were divided into three experimental groups and one control group: The +R-IE Group received rule explanation and was exposed to regular, unenhanced input; the +R+IE Group received rule explanation and enhanced input; the -R+IE Group received enhanced input without rule explanation; the -R-IE Group, also the Control Group received unenhanced input without any rule explanation. The target forms selected for the study were English past perfect tense and five content words. The subjects were asked to retell the story after they had read the text, and their retellings were recorded. To measure learners' noticing of the target forms, a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed on the raw data.The major findings are: (1) Those who received rule explanation did not outperform those who did not receive rule explanation; (2) those exposed to enhanced input only showed greater noticing of the past perfect tense than those exposed to unenhanced input; and (3) those who received both rule explanation and enhanced input outperformed those who only received rule explanation, but they failed to show greater noticing than those exposed to enhanced input. And the author explained the results from the features of the targeted linguistic forms, the learners' limited attentional resources and the input processing theory. The implications of the variation of results for research and classroom, the limitations and suggestions for the future research are discussed at last.