The Noticing Function Of Output And Input Enhancement In SLA

As quite a few studies have found that comprehensible input is not sufficient in second language acquisition, the study of output has become the research interest of some researchers. Meanwhile, many studies have shown that attention is important in language learning, and consequently researchers have begun to seek various means to draw attention to the target form for learning to take place. Under such circumstances, the present study investigates the potentially facilitating effects of output and visual input enhancement on the noticing and acquisition of the tenses consistency/agreement of the main clause, which is in the simple past tense, and the object clause by learners of English as a foreign language. This study attempts to answer three questions: (a) Does visual input enhancement promote noticing of formal elements in the target language input and affect the subsequent learning of the form? (b) Does output promote noticing of formal elements in the target language input and affect the subsequent learning of the form? (c) Would output-induced noticing and learning be the same as that affected by visual input enhancement designed to draw learners' attention to problematic forms in the input?The present study is a controlled experimental one with a pretest-posttest design, involving four experimental groups and one control group (N = 50; n = 10). Reconstruction and reading task are used as the vehicle of presentation of the target input materials. The experiment proceeds by following that the subjects read and understand the text; the subjects who are required to produce output reconstruct the text as accurately as possible and the subjects who are not required to produce output answer questions; and they demonstrate comprehension of the text by writing a recall summary in their L1 Chinese. The total and average scores for each of the four experimental groups in the testing instruments are calculated. T-test is carried out to analyze the differences among all the subjects in the four groups under different input-output treatment conditions while ANOVA is to analyze the effects and interaction of the two output groups during output 1 and 2.The major findings are: (1) Both output and visual input enhancement had significant effects on the noticing of the target form in the input; (2) The subjects engaged in the output-input treatment outperformed the subjects exposed to the same input for the mere purpose of comprehension in learning gains; (3) The effect of visual input enhancement on the noticing and acquisition of the target form was not comparable to that of output.