The Effect Of Three Types Of Output Activities On Uptake And Acquisition Of Future Passive Voice In English

The aim of the current study is to investigate the effects of three production activities on uptake (immediate performance) and acquisition of future passive voice in English. It also investigates the relationship between uptake and acquisition. The three types of output included dictation treatment, individual reconstruction treatment and collaborative reconstruction treatment. Dictation usually require learners to remember short sentences or chunks of longer sentences only, whereas reconstruction activities typically require learners to piece together an entire text they have previously read or heard. In this study, the reconstruction activity requires participants to remember a relatively long stretch of text and to retell it from memory. The subjects need to allocate their limited resources to both store and process information. During the individual reconstruction participants should finish the task independently, on the other hand collaborative reconstruction subjects completed the task in pairsThe research questions to be addressed in this study are the following:(1) What are the effects of a) dictation, b) individual reconstruction, c) collaborative reconstruction activities, on uptake of future passive voice in English?(2) What are the effects of a) dictation, b) individual reconstruction, c) collaborative reconstruction activities, on long-term acquisition of future passive voice in English?(3) Is there any correlation between uptake and acquisition in this study?The participants were 60 students enrolled in senior high school in Grade One in Shangrao. Three parallel classes of equal size and equal level participated the three treatments respectively. Twenty students were optionally chosen from each class. Participants completed a timed grammatical test as a pretest. There were three separate treatment administrations. The entire experiment took 3 weeks from pretest to delayed posttest. Immediately following the each treatment, participants completed a posttest and a delayed posttest one week later.The major findings of the present study are summarized below:1. The results of uptake showed that the three activities had a strong effect on uptake. The dictation group performed the best among three groups on uptake of future passive voice. Collaborative reconstruction group outperformed the individual reconstruction group on uptake of future passive voice.2. There was significant difference among the three tasks on acquisition. Collaborative reconstruction group has got the highest scores in two posttests. In the immediate posttest there were statistically significant differences between dictation group and collaborative reconstruction group. In the delayed posttest collaborative reconstruction group got the greatest acquisition and there were significant differences between collaborative reconstruction group and the other two groups.3. There is no significant correlation between uptake and acquisition. The dictation group resulted in greater uptake, though it did not lead to greater acquisition. The individual reconstruction group showed the opposite results with relatively low uptake, but not less acquisition.The findings lend support for the theory of Output Hypothesis. The significance of the study is that it may help teachers to make better-informed decisions about what activities to choose and may help researchers understand how activities differentially affect the learning process.