Effect Of Pushed Output Task On Noticing In Listening Comprehension And L2 Development

Finding efficient and effective methods in second language teaching has been a wide concern. Long (1991) proposes "focus on form", which overtly draws students'attention to linguistic elements as they rise incidentally in lessons whose overriding focus is on meaning or communication. Based on the capacity theory/multiple-resource theory promoted by Wickens (1989) and Swain's noticing function of output (1995), this study intends to explore the effects of learners' 'pushed output' during a multi-stage reconstruction task on learners' noticing of past hypothetical conditional, text comprehension and the development of past hypothetical conditional in subsequent production. The participants were 47 intermediate English learners from two parallel classes in a university. Later on, two classes were randomly divided into the experimental group (EG:+output) and the control group (CG:-output) respectively. The EG listened to a text and engaged in a text reconstruction task; the CG received the same aural input but answered comprehension extension questions. Both groups were instructed to take notes and took part in the pretest and posttest. Quantity analyses were made with the program SPSS (Statistic Package of Social Science), which was employed to process the data collected by notes, pretest and posttest. Besides, retrospective questionnaire helped with qualitative analyses. The results of the analyses demonstrate that our research is according well with the multiple-resource theory, i.e., participants could notice meaning and form simultaneously in the modality of aural input, at least a superficial triggering to the name of certain grammatical knowledge. Besides, the results also reveal that the EG 1) notice more target form, even if it is not statistically significant; however, constraint by the aural input, instead of the integrated structure, vast participants notice some isolated item of the target form; 2) comprehend more information of the text; 3) attempt to use or use target like forms in their subsequent production.