A Study Of Output And Past Tense Acquisition

In the field of second language acquisition (SLA), the role of output has been neglected for a long time by many linguists and researchers. Some linguists and researchers, (e.g., Krashen, 1981, 1994, 1998) hold that learners can develop high levels of language and literacy competence without any language production at all and that comprehensible input is the only causative variable in SLA. However, the Canadian linguist, Merrill Swain, draws on decades'studies and finds that comprehensible input alone is insufficient to learn a second language and that output is also an essential role to be counted on. Therefore, Swain (1993) proposes output hypothesis without denying the important role of comprehensible input and attaches three functions to output, namely, the noticing function, the hypothesis-testing function and the metalinguistic function.Based on output hypothesis theoretically, the present thesis makes attempts to analyze and discuss the second function of output, or the hypothesis-testing function. It seeks answers to the following questions:(1) When pushed to modify their output by clarification requests, do learners reformulate them by using the well-formed grammatical forms or more advanced interlanguage forms?(2) Do learners who are pushed to modify their output by clarification requests outperform those who just overhear the modified output in grammatical accuracy of the past tense?(3) If learners do reformulate their output by using the well-formed grammatical forms, can they show subsequent increase in the grammatical accuracy and acquire the well-formed grammatical forms of past tense (i.e. have a long - term effect on learners'use of the accurate grammatical form)?The quantitative research method was employed in this study to analyze and discuss the hypothesis-testing function of output. 65 freshmen in Suzhou Medical and Technical College participated in this empirical study and each of them produced output in both written and oral forms, with 61 participants'output being valid. The present study resorted to the statistic package SPSS 11.5 to analyze the participants'output. The main findings of the study can be summarized as the follows:(1) When pushed to modify their output by clarification requests, learners corrected 33 percent of their errors with the well-formed grammatical forms, which suggests that learners can test their self-formed hypotheses about the target language rules and modify their output against the clarification requests from their interlocutors.(2) Learners who were pushed to modify their output by clarification requests outperformed those who just overheard the modified output in grammatical accuracy of the past tense, which justifies the effects of producing comprehensible output on the acquisition of a certain grammatical form.(3) Of all the eight speakers who did reformulate their output by using the well-formed grammatical forms, four of them showed subsequent increase in the grammatical accuracy and acquired the well-formed grammatical forms of past tense, which demonstrates that the reformulated output enables the learners to have greater control over a certain grammatical form and benefits the learners'acquisitionality.It is expected that the present study will be useful for the further study of the related issues and that it will suggest some implications for second language learning and teaching.