An Experimental Study Of Input Enhancement On Noticing Andacquisition Of Tag Question

Input is the most basic language material in the second language acquisition. In China,the learners can be only provided a large quantity of unnatural input to create an artificialsecond language environment with abundant language materials. Under such a circumstance,input still has to be "noticed" first and then be transformed into comprehensible input, andthus it has a possibility of turning into intake and acquiring further process for the learners. Inview of this, it will be the key to the promotion of second language acquisition that how tostrengthen the learners’ attention to the target linguistic form. This study is adopting the mostdirect way with certain feasibility to enhance the input and highlight the target linguistic formfrom the visual, auditory and other aspects, exploring whether a particular linguistic formwith enhancement would be more likely to attract the learners’ attention and contribute to thesecond language acquisition.Tag question is selected as the target linguistic form in the current experiment, which isone of the grammatical forms that Chinese second language learners generally feel difficult tomaster. This study increases the perceptual salience of the target form by means of inputenhancement variations so as to probe into the effects of second language acquisition, whichmay provide some useful reference in teaching practice to promote the students’ foreignlanguage learning and acquisition.Based on the Noticing Hypothesis and the Input Hypothesis, the research makes use ofinput enhancement variations via a controlled experiment, trying to find out the impact onChinese English learners’ noticing and acquisition of tag question. It is designed to reveal thesignificant promotion which may be brought by the enhanced input to the noticing andacquisition of tag question. The experiment draws out the performance scores of the fourgroups via a pre-test, a grouping experiment and posttests. And SPSS19.0is applied to makeT-test analyses between the groups and within the groups. The main findings are as follows:(1) Input enhancement has significantly promoted the learners to pay attention to the tagquestion, and each input enhancement variation makes effects in different degrees. Ruleinstruction and reciting gain the strongest promotion and the textual enhancement follows.Rule instruction is a kind of explicit knowledge. The teacher guides the learners to payattention to the crucial features of the linguistic form to make the rules very clear, therebyenhancing the participants’ noticing of the target grammatical form, which reflects theimportant role of "instruction" among the six factors in the Noticing Hypothesis. In addition,reciting belongs to the factor of "task demand" in the hypothesis. To accomplish the task, thelearners will consume special noticing resource to the language input. Although theparticipants here receive the regular text, concerning the noticing test is made up of thesentences selected from the text, they have all the text in their memory, which plays a role intheir correct performances. As for the effect of textual enhancement is slightly lower than theformer two variations, this is due to the indirect impact from reciting which is implicit to theparticipants. According to the emphasis of "perceptual salience" in the Noticing Hypothesis,textual enhancement still has a certain degree of dominance recognition so that it is morelikely to be noticed compared with other forms of input. Therefore, the three enhanced groupshave a stronger noticing of the tag question than the control group.(2) Input enhancement has significantly promoted the learners to acquire the tag question,and each input enhancement variation makes effects in different degrees. Rule instruction and reciting gain the strongest promotion and the textual enhancement follows. Rule instructionfocuses on direct talk about the rules of grammar, making the comprehensible inputinternalized so as to transit the conscious learning to unconscious acquisition gradually. Theparticipants from the Reciting Group are able to form a memory network in brain on the basisof comprehensible input through the collaborative working of the visual organs, sense organs,auditory organs as well as muscular movement. The comprehensible input is furtherinternalized under the language acquisition device and achieves to be acquired. As for theeffect of textual enhancement is slightly lower than the former two variations, this is mainlybecause of its single visual stimulation which makes the participants to discover thecharacteristics of tag question naturally. The participants need to carry out internal analysisand form-meaning matching and the efficiency of which should be a little bit lower than theformer two variations. But textual enhancement still has its advantage of implicit interventionand is easier to mobilize the learners’ knowledge of the language. Therefore, the threeenhanced groups have a better acquisition of the tag question than the control group.(3) According to the comparison between the enhanced groups and the unenhancedgroup, the former brings an obvious promotion and makes a positive effect. The three inputenhancement variations do boost the efficiency of learners’ noticing, processing,comprehension and acquisition of tag question, whereas it can be seen from the fall of scoresof the delayed posttest that input enhancement can promote the language acquisition but cannot guarantee permanent acquisition. Therefore, input enhancement can be used as excellentteaching resources to assist the second language learners to improve the actual efficiency ofthe target language acquisition.The above findings suggest that, input enhancement can effectively promote learners’noticing and acquisition of the tag question. In the case of tag question being highlighted, thelearners will allocate more attention resources in order to promote the transition ofcomprehensible input and internalization of the grammar rules, and thus to improve theefficiency of the second language acquisition.