Effects Of Textual Enhancement On The Acquisition Of Subject-verb Agreement By Chinese Non-english Major Students

In the last century,the term textual enhancement was first introduced based on input enhancement in the field of second language acquisition.It was thought that textual enhancement was a technique which modifies the physical appearance of target forms by making them italicized,bolded,underlined or font size reset etc.Such technique which enhances the saliency of the target form increases the cheances of noticing so that learners could promote the acquisition of the target form.This research intends to investigate the effects of textual enhancement on the acquisition of subject-verb agreement by Chinese non-English major students through conducting an experiment and administering a questionnaire.The study also aims to explore whether different kinds of textual enhancement technique will exert different effects on the acquisition of a target form.Based on a pre-test,three classes were chosen for the experiment:two classes as experimental groups(enhanced types:yellow highlighted and underlined)and one as control group.Then the experiment groups were given four weeks" treatments for the acquisition of subject-verb agreement,while the control group only received normal teaching.After the treatments,a posttest,a delayed-posttest and a questionnaire survey were conducted.Then one-way ANOVA was used to analyze the data with the help of SPSS 24.0 package.Results show that textual enhancement has significant effects on non-English major students9 acquisition of subject-verb agreement.In addition,the two different types of enhancement did not have statistic significant effects in both the participants' posttest and the delayed test.In another respect,the results from the questiornalre show that most students of the two experimental groups think that textual enhancement helped to attract their attention and facilitated their acquisition of the target form.Therefore,it can be concluded that textual enhancement can facilitate Chinese non-English major students9 acquisition of subject-verb agreement.This research can hopefully have some pedagogical implications for both college English teaching and learning.