The Effects Of Textual Enhancement On EFL Junior Middle School Learners' Noticing And Acquisition Of The Target Form

This study was undertaken to find out the effects of TE on EFL junior middle school learners'noticing and acquisition of the target form. Noticing was measured by online (think-aloud protocols) data elicitation procedure, while acquisition was measured by offline (pretest and posttest) data elicitation procedures. A total of 58 second year junior middle school (grade 8) students took part in the study. They were randomly assigned—29 in the experimental group and 29 in the control group. The target linguistic form was past perfect tense. The students read either the enhanced or the unenhanced version of two English passages containing 8 target forms. Among them,12 students were selected to think aloud while reading the passages and doing the immediate post test. Participants' performances on online and offline tasks were subsequently submitted to both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The results of quantitative study showed that the number of reported noticing of target forms in the input were statistically similar for both the enhanced and the unenhanced groups. However, qualitative study indicated that TE had deepened thought processing for participants in the enhanced group. Results also showed that there were significant correlation between noticing and acquisition for the enhanced group but not for the unenhanced group. The study found that depth of noticing which has been ignored for many SLA research is a key factor for the conversion from noticing to acquisition. And this would depend on whether or not learners are able to perceive, store, and apply the salient information. At last, the research called for that not only the criteria for measuring noticing but also research on SLA should lay much more emphases on noticing at a profound level in the future.