A Study On The Effect Of Output Tasks In Promoting The Acquisition Of Language Form

The thesis focuses on the function of language output. In recent years, a few experimental studies of the role of output have been carried out by some researchers abroad and at home. The findings of these studies show that output may facilitate the acquisition of linguistic forms. However, most of the studies follow the research of Izumi et al. (1999) and Izumi & Bigelow (2000). They take past hypothetical conditional as the target form in their experiments, and they choose college students as the subjects. Based on the theory of Output Hypothesis, the present thesis attempts to further explore the effectiveness of the role of output in other grammatical forms. English relative clause (RC) is chosen as the target form in the present thesis for it is difficult for Chinese L2 learners to acquire and high school is the critical period for L2 learners to acquire RC.The study attempts to answer the following two questions:1. Does the experimental group show greater noticing of the target form than the control group?2. Does the experimental group perform better than the control group in the acquisition of the target form?The subjects were selected from Fengyang High School. 34 (16 for EG and 18 for CG) subjects participated the experiment from the beginning to the end. The instruments for the study included treatment materials, output task, comprehension task, one pretest, one immediate posttest and one delayed posttest. In the present 8-week experiment, the EG students were exposed to output task (guided writing ), while the CG students were exposed to comprehension task (true or false questions). The participants in EG were asked to read the passage and underline the words which they felt were important for the subsequent guided writing, and, members in CG were required to underline the words related to the subsequent true or false questions. The Independent-Samples T-test was used to analyze the quantitative data.The major findings of the present study are summarized below: 1. The results of the underlining score show that the difference was not significant between experimental group and control group in noticing of the target form. This result was identical with Izumi et al.'s findings in 1999 and 2000, which did not confirm the first hypothesis which predicted the experimental group would show greater noticing of the target form than the control group.2. The results of the post-tests show that the experimental groups significantly outperform the control group in the accurate use of the target form, which exhibits that output tasks are superior over comprehension tasks in the acquisition of the target form. This finding serves as experimental evidence for Swain's output hypothesis which claims that output can facilitate the acquisition of the target form. In addition, the role of output remained a long-term effect in the present studyThe findings serve as experimental evidence for Swain's output hypothesis; the present study might also offer some pedagogical implications for the application of the output tasks for English teaching and learning in China. First of all, we should enhance the learners'production consciousness, and changing traditional grammar teaching method is of key importance. Then we should pay attention to the design of output tasks and the backwash effect of tests.