The Effects Of Oral Output On Chinese College Students' Acquisition Of English Linguistic Forms

The Output Hypothesis proposed by Swain (1995,1998) claims that the activity of producing the target language may, under some circumstances, prompt second language (L2) learners to recognize consciously some of their linguistic problems and bring to their attention something they need to discover about their second language. This study examines the noticing function of oral output. Some studies have been carried out to explore this function overseas and home, however, most of them either use the written form or use small samples in the experiments. The present experimental study with a relatively large sample aims to investigate the noticing function of oral output on noticing and acquisition of grammatical form.By comparing the effects of output task and traditional listening comprehension task, the present study investigates whether oral output has a positive impact on L2 learners' noticing and acquisition of the past hypothetical conditionals in English. The research questions in the present study are:1. Does oral output activity promote the Chinese college students' noticing of the target grammatical form in the following input material?2. Does input-output activity improve Chinese college English learners' output of the target grammatical form?50 subjects in this study are non-English major sophomores from two parallel classes in Lanzhou University of Technology. According to the results of pretest conducted two weeks before the experiment, 25 students at intermediate level in each class were chosen, and then one class was randomly taken as experimental group (EG) and the other as control group (CG).There were two experimental phases in the present study, and their experimental procedures were the same with different input materials and tasks. Before each experimental phase began, all the participants were told the procedures. And immediately after the listening input, EG were expected to retell the story and CG to finish listening comprehension questions about the content. First, all participants listened to the same input material and took notes about the content or linguistic forms at the same time. Then, EG were required to retell the story while CG to finish listening comprehension questions. Next, all participants listened to the same input material and took notes again. Finally, EG were required to retell the story and CG to finish the listening comprehension questions again. Upon finishing the first experimental phase, both groups were to take the immediate posttests. Two weeks later, a delayed posttest was conducted.The data were collected from two note-takings of both EG and CG, two outputs of EG in each of the two experimental phases, and four tests of both EG and CG throughout the whole experiment. At the same time, a questionnaire and an interview were analyzed to give some support to the results.The major findings of the present study are as follows:1. EG outperformed CG in note-taking of phase 2, showing greater noticing of the target form than CG. Although the results of noticing in phase 1 did not show significant differences, the questionnaire and interview both proved that the EG participants did show greater noticing than CG. By contrast, CG paid more attention to the content than to the target form. Output, to some extent, led to EG's significant increase of noticing of target form.2. EG also showed significant differences in accurate use of the target form between the two outputs of experimental phase 2, indicating that EG could immediately incorporate the target form into their output after the second exposure to the input material. This lent some support to Swain's (1995) claim that the activity of producing the target language may prompt L2 learners to consciously recognize some of their linguistic problems and bring to their attention something they need to discover about their L2, which may lead them to find solution in the subsequent input.3. The results of delayed posttest did not show significant differences although significance appeared on other tests, suggesting that the effect of oral output activity in the present study on acquisition of linguistic forms was short-term and a series of activities should be conducted to maintain the effect.Based on the above findings, several pedagogical implications were drawn. Chinese college English teachers should take advantage of the noticing function of output by providing learners with more opportunities to output to fully develop learners' proficiency and to maintain the effect of output. Meanwhile, after the production attempt, teachers can give learners feedback on the success of their production in terms of content and grammar, for it seems "the optimal intervention point by the teacher" (Izumi, 2003). What's more, when the tasks are given to the learners, teachers should take account of some factors, for example, communicative context, the cognitive demands of the task, and necessity of class formal instruction.