Effects Of Output On Chinese High School Learners' Noticing And Acquisition Of Passive Form

Since the Output Hypothesis was proposed by Swain (1985), more and more researchers have paid attention to the role of output in the SLA. In the hypothesis, Swain (1993,1995) has elaborated on the three functions of output, namely, hypothesis-testing function, metalinguistic function and noticing/triggering function. Of the three functions of output, the present study focuses on the noticing function, which claims that the activity of producing the target language may trigger learners to recognize some of their linguistic problems and then bring about learners'enhanced acquisition.In the past two decades, a lot of studies have been carried out to explore this function at home and abroad. However, most of them have taken the past hypothetical conditional in English as the target form and have produced mixed results. To further examine the noticing function of output, the author conducted an experimental study which takes the passive form in English as the target form to investigate the effects of output on noticing and acquisition. The present study focuses on the following questions:(1) Does output promote learners'noticing of the passive form in English? (2) Does output facilitate learners'acquisition of the passive form in English?123 subjects involved in this study are second-year high school learners from two parallel classes in Caocun High School, Shaanxi Province. One is randomly taken as control group (CG) and the other as experimental group (EG). The whole study lasted three weeks. In the experimental phase, both groups received the same input materials. But EG was asked to finish the text-reconstruction task after being exposed to the material; CG was asked to finish the traditional comprehension questions instead of reconstructing the text. Both groups were required to take notes when they were reading. After finishing the experimental phase, both groups were asked to take posttest and answer questionnaires. And a formal interview was performed on 20 subjects (10 from EG and 10 from CG). One week later, delayed-posttest was conducted.The data collected from two note-takings of both EG and CG, two outputs of EG, and three tests of both EG and CG were analyzed with the assistance of Statistical Package for the Social Science Version 11.5. At the same time, the subjects responses to questionnaires and interview were analyzed as well.The major findings of the present study are:(1) The results of the note-takings showed that EG did not show greater noticing of the target form than CG. However, the results of the text reconstructions showed a significant difference in noticing the target form; (2) Output promoted EG'acquisition of the target form in posttest, but the gain disappeared in delayed-posttest. The result indicated that the text-reconstruction task just produced a positive but short-term effect on acquisition of the target form.The study provides insights into the teaching of English linguistic forms for Chinese high school English teachers. Teachers should make use of the noticing function of output by means of providing learners with more output opportunities in order to fully develop learners' proficiency of English language.