An Experimental Study On The Influence Of Input Enhancement On The Improvement Of Oral Ability Of Thai Primary Chinese Learners

Visual input enhancement and input flow are two indirect and implicit teaching tools,respectively,to attract learners’ attention to a language form and to improve input efficiency so as to achieve the acquisition of that form.Currently,research on visual input enhancement and input flow is incomplete,and some of these studies are still somewhat controversial.Studies have demonstrated that input enhancement has a positive effect on learners’ acquisition of Chinese as a second language in terms of grammar,blocks of speech,and vocabulary,but further research is needed to determine whether it has a positive effect on the development of speaking skills.This study investigates whether input based on input flow and visual input enhancement can expand students’ input to the target language and whether the input needs to be controlled in terms of intensity.The study focused on the following four questions:(1)whether simple input enhancement has a positive effect on the improvement of spoken Chinese;(2)whether the combination of input enhancement and input flow is better than simple input enhancement;(3)whether multimodal input is better than unimodal acquisition;(4)whether a wider variety of input enhancement is better.By dividing the subjects into four groups for the experiment,each group read the same text,each group was presented in a different way,and finally completed the same test.It was found that:(1)visual input enhancement alone had a positive effect on the improvement of Thai elementary Chinese learners’ speaking ability;(2)the combination of input based on visual input enhancement and input flow was more effective in improving elementary Chinese learners’ controlled output communicative ability and free output communicative ability;(3)no significant difference was found between the acquisition effects of multimodal input and unimodal input;(4)the multimodal input approach increased the burden of information processing and cognitive load of learners,distracted learners’ attention from the target form,and weakened their effect on the acquisition of the target structure;therefore,a certain amount of input and input modality should be controlled.In conclusion,input enhancement can attract learners’ attention to the target structure and help facilitate their acquisition of the target language features.