| This thesis reports an empirical study on the function of output activity in acquisition of six lexical collocations in SLA. Output, as is claimed by Merrill Swain (1995), plays three functions, one of which is noticing triggering/prompting function. In particular, the activity of producing the target language may prompt L2 learners to recognize their linguistic problems and bring to their attention what they need to discover about the L2, and as a result, acquisition is facilitated.The experiment was implemented among two third-year classes in a junior middle school. A specially designed and focused output task - sentence completion in answering comprehension questions - was used as the treatment tool for the experiment group, together with six ready made passages as the input materials. The comparison group read the six input passages as well, but they did multiple choice comprehension tasks instead. A two-week treatment was carried out in three phases, each of which processed in an input - task - input - task pattern.The analysis of the data collected through an immediate posttest and a delayed posttest points to three major findings of this study: First, the production activities had a significantly better effect in facilitating the learners to acquire second language than the comprehension activities. This finding is essentially a supporting argument for Swain (1995)'s claim that output promotes output promotes noticing and learning language forms. Second, the same production task had different effects on forms of different features. An additional finding was attained that the learners performed better at the translation tasks than at the error-correction tasks; the translation tasks that are higher in cognitive demands show greater individual variation than the error-correction tasks that are lower in cognitive demands. These findings are discussed with regard to the efficacy of output in promoting learning as well as the conditions for output to be facilitative in SLA.
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