The Effect Of Awareness-Raising On Grammar Learning

In recent years, researches done in the second language acquisition field become related to other fields, such as psychology, cognition and sociology. The concepts concerning cognitive psychology, e.g. awareness, noticing and memory are introduced into SLA and are examined to see whether these factors can affect language learning. Schmidt proposes "Noticing Hypothesis", arguing that "subliminal language learning is impossible, and that noticing is the necessary and sufficient condition for converting input to intake". He also distinguishes three levels of awareness. Specifically, they are perception, noticing and understanding. Based on Schmidt's theories, the author does the present study. Generally speaking, this study is aimed to find out (1) the relationship between the level of awareness and the learning effect; (2) the role noticing plays in the target grammatical point learning; (3) whether different attention-drawing devices applied can affect the learning of the target feature and which can lead to the best achievement; (4) whether the implicit attention-drawing device and the way of making the participants produce the target language can promote learning of the target feature; (5) whether different means used to draw learners' attention have an impact on awareness development.The target of instruction was the usage of past participles as adverbial and the subjects were 100 grade one students in No. 1 Senior Middle School in Mengzhou, who were learning English as a foreign language. The participants were divided into four groups, with three as experimental groups and the other as the control group. The attention of the experimental groups was attracted to the target linguistic form, either explicitly, implicitly, or by being asked to produce the target language. As for the control group, they were only required to read the training materials which were neither modified nor with rule explanations. After training, the participants were tested by fulfilling two tasks: the grammaticality judgement task and the fill-in-blank task. The participants were also asked to complete a questionnaire, which was designed to distinguish different levels of awareness.After data collection, analyses were done by means of SPSS (16.0). The findings can be summarized as follows: (1) The level of awareness does correlate positively with the learning effect of the target grammatical form. Awareness at the higher level results in better learning effect than the lower level; (2) Awareness at the noticing level can facilitate learning of the target grammatical point as well; (3) Different attention-drawing devices do result in different learning effects. Explicit instruction about rules can result in the best achievement in the target grammatical form learning; (4) Input enhancement also has a strong impact on learning, while making the participants produce the target grammatical item turns out to be less effective to induce learning improvement; (5) Attention-drawing devices are found to be correlated with awareness-raising. The most explicit means leads to the highest degree of awareness.This study is conducted to contribute to raising the English teachers' consciousness in applying awareness-raising strategies to their teaching practice and to help the teachers choose the proper attention-drawing device so as to facilitate the conversion of input to intake and accelerate the learning of the target language.