An Empirical Study On Students' Acquisition Of English Articles Based On The Noticing Hypothesis And Input Enhancement

English has a rapid development in the past two decades as a foreign language in China. But, only a very small part of the second language learners can master English and use the language as well as native people. Such as the apply of articles, which does not exist in our mother tongue, is a big barrier in many learners'way of using English. Articles are the most common used but complicated words in English. And they can be classified into three kinds, definite article, indefinite article and zero article. The analysis of articles as a functional category has significant implications to language acquisition, both in native language and second language acquisition. The acquisition of the uses of articles has become the focus of recent second language acquisition researches.Based on the researches on articles, this thesis aims at the analysis whether the theories of noticing hypothesis and input enhancement can promote the students'acquisition of English articles. According to Schmidt (1994), noticing of the target features in second language is the necessary condition for the transformation of input to intake. Pedagogical skill like input enhancement has been designed to draw learners'attention to the grammatical features of the input. The thesis makes effort to prove comprehensible input in the second language acquisition is not enough to raise the intake of target form. Focus on form as well as the meaning can promote the intake of target form.Altogether 79 adult college students in Shanxi Normal University took part in this study, and among them 19 students participated in pilot study, so they did not include in the main study. They came from 2 English classes and none of them has abroad experience. They were freshmen majoring in Social physical education. At the beginning of this study, they had finished three years of high school English learning and began learning of Essential College English as compulsory courses for freshmen and sophomores in our country. They took four classes per week which lasted for 45 minutes. The research lasted for one month. They used identical English textbooks during the time of the experiment. Moreover, they are almost at the similar proficiency of English before the experiment. And the students took part in the main study were divided into two groups, in which they were randomly selected. Each group is composed of 30 subjects. The instruments used in present study depending on the qualitative methods to analyze the relationship between the acquisition of articles and the input methods. Here the quantitative method includes questionnaire, composition test and error correction test.The thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter One gives us a general idea about the research, which discusses the research aim and organization of the thesis. Chapter Two summarizes the relative theories and researches which set foundations of the following study. Chapter Three introduces the experiments conducted in this thesis, which elaborates the design of the experiment, including the hypothesis questions, subject, instruments, and procedures. Chapter Four provides the result of the study. Chapter Five summarizes the main finding of this thesis and shows out the implication and suggestions of the current study to English Article teaching and acquisition.