An Experimental Study Of The Effects Of Output And Self-correction On The Acquisition Of The English Relative Clause By Chinese Middle School Students

Output remains a hot topic in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) field. However, there has been no conclusive agreement on its effects on L2 grammatical learning. Similarly, self-correction has drawn much of SLA researchers' attention to its role in promoting learner autonomy. Yet, only a few studies compare the effects of output and self-correction in the learning of grammatical forms. In view of these facts, this thesis intends to explore the effects of output and self-correction, and the similarities and differences between them.This thesis reports an experimental study that investigates the effects of output and self-correction on learning English relative clause. 122 students in a Chinese middle school participated in the experiment as subjects, which were divided into one control group and three experimental groups. The four groups were asked to conduct four different tasks: reading, reading-plus-reconstruction, reading-plus-reconstruction-plus -self-correction and reading-plus-self-correction. 40 subjects from the 4 groups were interviewed after the experiment. Pretest, experiment, posttest and interview data were collected and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively.Data analysis yields the following findings: (1) output significantly affects the learning of English relative clause by raising participants' awareness to formal elements in the input and their noticing of the mismatches between their interlanguage form and the target language input; (2) self-correction significantly stimulates L2 learners' learning of English relative clause. By self-correcting, L2 learners become aware of their errors and fix their attention on English relative clause so that they can improve their acquisition of the target form; (3) task frequency enhances the acquisition of English relative clause. The subjects' learning outcomes increased significantly with the increasing frequency of tasks.The findings of the present research prove the effects of output and self-correction on noticing and the acquisition of English relative clause. Therefore, L2 learners should have more opportunities to produce output and conduct self-correction in English grammatical learning. Furthermore, this study provides evidence for the strength of task frequency and the importance of sufficient input to perceive and produce the target form for L2 learners.