Effects Of Consciousness-raising Tasks On EFL Learners' Acquisition Of "V+P₁+P₂" Constructions

This paper investigates the effects of consciousness-raising tasks on Chinese EFL learners'acquisition of two types of verb-double particle (V+P1+P2) constructions. Robust documents have noted the relationship between consciousness-raising and second language acquisition and use. However, there are fewer studies on effects of different degree of raising learners'awareness on the acquisition of the English V+P1+P2 constructions. Based on these, the author designed the present study.The present study consists of three parts—a pretest, four treatments and two posttests. The pretest was carried out to get a picture of the EFL learners'acquisition of the English V+P1+P2 constructions. An immediate posttest (posttest one) and a delayed posttest (posttest two) were taken to check the effects of consciousness-raising tasks and duration of the effects. Firstly, sophomores from a certain college in south China (N=131) were chosen to be the subjects in the pretests in order to research the EFL learners'acquisition of V+P1+P2 constructions. These 131 students came from four classes, which constituted four groups: three experimental groups and one control group. After the pretest, different treatments (consciousness-raising tasks) were carried out to the four groups. (1) Group one was exposed to enhanced input and also received the overt explanation of the target language constructions and then did some relevant exercises. (2) Group two was only exposed to enhanced input. (3) Group three only received the least and unenhanced input. (4) Group four received no consciousness-raising task. In the process of analyzing the results of both posttest one and posttest two, subjects (N=121) were further chosen after excluding those who were to a certain extent seen to be conscious of the features of V+P1+P2 constructions. After collecting and sorting out original data, one-way ANOVA was applied in the data analysis.The results are shown as follows. Results of the pretest (the average mean score=10.95) showed that most subjects were not aware of the features of V+P1+P2 constructions and they missed the first particle P1. In general, in both posttests, three experimental groups outperformed the control group (experimental groups> control group); among the three experimental groups, the group that received more and enhanced input, interpretation task and the exercise task showed the greatest improvement; the group receiving only enhanced input outperformed that receiving the unenhanced input (group one > group two> group three). According to the results of one-way ANOVA, four groups were at the same level of acquisition of the English V+P1+P2 constructions in the pretest, thereby, any change in posttests would be due to the treatments they respectively received before the posttest.The present study compensates for few studies on the English V+P1+P2 construction and testifies to the fact that consciousness-raising tasks can facilitate acquisition of the target structure. Results of the present study support the Noticing Hypothesis; the discussion on factors causing difficulty in learning the English V+P1+P2 constructions sheds light on the theory of Contrastive Analysis; reconceptulization in the process of learning a second language is an important step; more efficient ways of raising language learners'consciousness of the target structures should be explored in further language teaching.