The Role Of Oral Output In Noticing And Promoting The Acquisition Of Linguistic Forms

The Comprehensible Output Hypothesis, proposed by Swain (1985), claims that producing target language enables the ESL leamers to notice the linguistic gaps in their existing interlanguage knowledge, to test their hypothesis about the targetlanguage based on the positive and negative feedback from their interlocutors, and to reflect upon their target language use. Many empirical, studies carried out to test the above three major functions of the Comprehensible Output Hypothesis lend some support to the Hypothesis in one way or another. But whether the Chinese EFL learners notice their linguistic problems in oral output, how they solve these linguistic problems, whether output promote their accurate use of linguistic forms and whether the resolutions they achieve in the reconstruction are retained in their later production were remained unanswered.This study aims to provide some evidence to the Comprehensible Output Hypothesis by investigating whether giving the EFL learners an opportunity for oral output encourages them to notice the gaps in their interlanguage and enhances their accuracy in their later linguistic use. To be brief, the present study tries to find out the answers to the following three research questions:1. While experimental group subjects retell the listening passage orally in pairs, do they notice the gaps in their linguistic knowledge? If so, what aspects of language forms do they focus on? How do they solve these linguistic problems?2. Do experimental group subjects with oral output achieve greater linguistic accuracy than control group subjects without output in two posttests?3. Are the resolutions reached by experimental group subjects in their reconstruction retained in the posttests?Sixty second year English major students in College of Foreign Languages, Shaanxi Normal University were randomly assigned as the subjects to two groups: an experimental group and a control group. First, the subjects in both groups listened to a story which was read twice to them at normal speed. Then, for control group, subjects only answered five multi-choice comprehension questions, while for experimental group, apart from doing the same comprehension questions, every two subjects formed a pair and engaged in a story-retelling task. An immediate posttest and a delayed posttest were administered to both groups. The experimental group subjects' interactions were transcribed and analyzed. A t-test for independent samples was done using statistic software SPSS 11.0. After the posttests, an interview was held between the researcher and 30 subjects from experimental group. The findings of the current study are summarized as follows:1. The experimental group did notice the grammatical problems in their oral output. The language features that the subjects focused attention to and negotiated in their production are the use of verbs, nouns, articles, participles, prepositions and so on, with the use of verbs accounting for the highest percentage. To solve these linguistic problems, they mainly applied grammatical rules and engaged in grammatical processing, and apart from that, they also used context clues, language intuition and meaning of words in their decision making.2. When comparing the scores of experimental group and control group in two posttests, the subjects with oral output outperformed those exposed to the same input for the sole purpose of comprehension in later use of linguistic features, which indicates that oral output encourages greater accurate use of linguistic features and plays an important role in promoting the Chinese EFL learners' learning of linguistic forms.3. By comparing the subjects' interactions with the answers in their posttests, about 70% of students' responses on the posttests were consistent with the resolutions reached during the reconstruction, which indicates that the majority of correct decisions made in the reconstruction were retained in their later use of the linguistic forms.The findings in the current study show that output prompts the Chinese EFL learners to notice the gaps in their interlanguage and has a positive impact on the acquisition of language forms. Some suggestions were also made to the EFL teaching and learning. The traditional concept of output should be changed. The EFL teachers should attach greater importance to the role of output and provide their students with more oppommities to develop their productive skills. More output-based tasks which require the EFL learners to produce output should be adopted in the language classroom. Grammar teaching can be integrated into a communicative methodology which requires the EFL learners to produce output and in turn deepen their understanding of grammatical knowledge.