The Effect Of Output Tasks On Acquisition Of Linguistic Form

On the basis of the Output Hypothesis, Swain (1995) proposed three functions of output,that is: the noticing function; the hypothesis-testing function and the metalinguistic function. The noticing function means that language output can prompt learners to recognize some linguistic problems of their interlanguage system and draw their more attention to the target form in the subsequent input, and finally facilitate acquisition.Based on the Output Hypothesis, the present study aims to investigate 1) whether the two output tasks (i.e., summary writing task and text-reconstruction task) could promote senior high school English learners'noticing of the English attributive clause in the subsequent input. 2)whether the two output tasks could improve senior high school English learners'acquisition of the target grammatical form. And whether the effects of output tasks on acquisition of the target form are long-term.64 subjects in current study are Grade one senior high school students in No.1 High School of Kaifeng City, Henan Province. On the basis of the same input material, the experiment group (N=32) accomplished the summary writing task and reconstruction task; the CG (N=32) finished the comprehension task. All subjects took part in the pretest and three posttests. SPSS was employed to analyze the data collected in treatment and tests.The two findings of the study were: 1) the two groups on the noticing of the target form in the two experiment phases did not reach the statistically significance. In the first phase, the CG showed more noticing than the EG, which may be due to the fact that the EG is under heavier cognitive load of understanding and recombination the passage with the most concise language. However, in the second phase, the EG showed greater noticing of the target form than the CG, which may be caused by noticing function of the output hypothesis, and this can be proved by the results of retrospective questions, about 85% the EG reported that they had difficulties in the linguistic form when they reconstruct the passage for the first time, therefore, they would pay more attention to the target form of the input for a second input. 2) On a whole, the two special output tasks do improve learners'acquisition of the target form to a great degree. The EG showed more gains on the acquisition of the target form than the CG in this study. The EG got higher score than the CG on the three posttests except for the immediate posttest1, and the difference between the two groups was statistically on immediate posttest2 and delayed posttest, hence, in this study; output tasks demonstrated its long-term effect. The major findings in this study largely support Swain's Output Hypothesis and have some pedagogical implications for communicative language teaching in Chinese context.