The Effect Of Vocabulary And Phrases Consciousness-raising Upon Chinese EFL Students' Writing Proficiency

Interests in learner' consciousness (noticing) have generated numerous studies in the field of second and foreign language acquisition though Krashen's has proposed the dichotomy of learning and acquisition and claimed the futility of learning in language acquisition. Up till now, scholars are generally convinced that it is beneficial for learners if their consciousness (noticing) is promoted to the target feature(s). In order to draw this conclusion, this paper first reviews the output hypothesis, the noticing hypothesis, and the interaction hypothesis, pointing out the important role played by noticing or consciousness-raising in these hypotheses: they all acknowledge its usefulness in acquiring a second or foreign language. According to the output hypothesis, output has the function of promoting learner' noticing, thus enabling learners to be conscious of the gap between their interlanguage and the target language, or of their inability to express themselves in the target language. The noticing hypothesis claims that noticing is the prerequisite for language acquisition. As for the interaction hypothesis, it holds that one reason why input through interaction is facilitative is because learners can get timely feedback from their interlocutors, which directs their attentional focus from information to form and enables them to identify the problem, and be sensitive to the concerned items in the subsequent input.Next the author gives scholars' definition of these similar terms such as consciousness, awareness, noticing and attention, and suggests what she means by the term "consciousness-raising". Then different techniques aiming at consciousness-raising are listed with their usefulness for language acquisition. The subsequent effects are mixed, with some treatment more effective than others.The usefulness of consciousness-Taising has been established through the review work. However, most studies only measure the immediate effect. Few, if any, have legitimized the use of this technique in the long term. And still fewer studies have explored the effect of vocabulary and phrases consciousness-raising on learner's writing proficiency. Although in China, vocabulary and phrases are paid particularattention for learners' English writing, few quantitative studies have been conducted. Due to Chinese students' limited English writing competence, we need more techniques in teaching writing and more scientific ways to legitimize the old practice and more ways to carry out "consciousness-raising". In this paper, four research hypotheses are brought forth:1) By directing learner's attention to new words and vocabulary, their subsequent writing will be better than those who are not made by their instructor to notice this particular aspect (measured by holistic scores for compositions given by experienced teachers, total number of t-unit and the total words of the compositions).2) The accuracy of writing by those learners whose notice level is raised on purpose will be better than those whose consciousness is not raised (measured by the number of grammatical errors committed by subjects).3) The sentences of the writing by the experiment group will be more complex than those by the control group (complexity is measured by mean length of T-units, and tokens/types ratio).4) Subjects in the experiment group whose consciousness has been raised will make more improvement in their writing proficiency than those of the control group whose consciousness has not been raised.In order to validate these hypotheses, the author has conducted a quasi-experiment for 12 weeks with two natural classes of freshmen in Wuhan University. The control group consisted of 32 students while the experiment group 33. Independent samples tests have found that there existed no significant difference between the control group's and the experiment group's English proficiency, and there existed no significant difference between the control group and the experiment group's first composition (except the control group's tokens/types ratio is lower than the experiment group). But in the second composition, the experiment group did much better than the control group in the aspect of length of t-unit. The experiment group also wrote compositions of higher quality and less errors, though the differences were not significant. Paired samples tests have found that the experiment had madesignificant improvement in the holistic score, total words and mean length of t-unit, but the control group did not make much improvement.The experiment supported the effectiveness of vocabulary and phrases consciousness-raising upon learners' writing proficiency and some suggestions were given to the teaching of English writing.The paper bears out the validity of consciousness-raising on the teaching of writing under a foreign language teaching environment. It may have some implications for further study and practice of the teaching of writing in China.