Investigating The Effects Of Input And Output In Learning English Past Counterfactual Conditional

Input and output are the most important components in second language acquisition. The different effects of input comprehension tasks and output tasks in learning the targeted grammatical form have drawn wide concern from researchers. The present study is about to investigate the effects of these two types of tasks in learning EPCC (English past counterfactual conditional) for CNECSs (Chinese non-English-majored college students).Based on the prior literature, three hypotheses are proposed to predict the performance of CNECSs in learning EPCC with different quantity of input and different types of postexposure tasks. SPSS 17.0 is employed to make statistical analyses on the data collected from the pretest, posttest and the delayed posttest.The results of the study show that with input comprehension tasks, more quantities of input would result in better learning in EPCC for CNECSs; with the same quantity of input, the output task could better promote CNECSs'learning of EPCC than the input comprehension tasks; the better effect of output tasks with the same quantity of input would vanish when the quantity of input for comprehension tasks increased.