Research On The Effects Of Input Enhancement On Students' Learning Of Subject-verb Agreement In High School English Writing

Since task-based language teaching(TBLT)has been implemented in Chinese middle schools for so long,scholars in the field of second language acquisition and English language teaching(ELT)start to reconsider the real effects of this approach,especially in this country's special educational settings.One of the reflections is how to focus the learners' attention on language forms so as to keep a balance between language fluency and accuracy under the framework of TBLT,which emphasizes a lot on meaning-exchange through the completion of tasks.Previous studies demonstrated that noticing is a necessary and sufficient means of facilitating the acquisition of grammatical forms and specific enhancement techniques such as textual enhancement input,input flood,grammar awareness raising tasks,structured input activities could be used to raise learners' awareness of these forms and improve their language competence and performance as a whole.This thesis attempts to investigate whether input enhancement techniques can improve the noticing and acquisition of the target grammatical form,i.e.subject-verb agreement structures in writing for senior high school students.One of the characteristics of this study is that most previous studies on the grammatical form of subject-verb agreement referred only to the application in grammar teaching.This paper attempts to apply input enhancement techniques in the teaching of writing.Another characteristic is the research subjects,who are senior high school students while most of the previous studies on input enhancement and grammar forms mainly focus on students of non-English majors in universities.Further more,in this study an experiment was carried out,with 60 students from two classes involved,one control class,the other experimental class.The experimental class accepted the training of enhancement techniques while the other received no intentional training.The experiment lasted eight weeks from October,2018 to December,2018.Based on the analysis of the data collected in this research,the author comes tothe following conclusions:1)Subjects who received input enhancement for subject-verb agreement in writing could notice the grammatical form more effectively than those who did not,and they would consciously modify the grammar errors that might occur in writing.2)The subjects who did not receive input enhancement failed to notice the target form of subject-verb agreement.3)Compared with non-enhancement input,input enhancement has significant difference in raising learners' attention and performance on subject-verb agreement in writing.However,whether input enhancement has significant long-term effect in increasing the frequency or accuracy of subject-verb agreement in subsequent writing needs asks for further study.The significance of this research lies in the aroused awareness of balanced competence between fluency and accuracy within the TBLT framework and the effective application of input enhancement techniques to improve the students' writing performance with special focus on subject-verb structures.The result collected from the experiment could provide more objective and meaningful implications for scholars of second language acquisition and ELT as well.