The Effects Of Textual Enhancement On Comprehension By High School English Learners In China

The current study investigated textual enhancement (TE) which is closely related to one of the most important issues in L1 and L2 acquisition ------ attention to form. Whether learners'attention to the linguistic features of target language input is necessary for language acquisition has invited much debate among researchers. Until now there is no solid conclusion. If attention to form is necessary, how such an important physiological and cognitive mechanism operates to facilitate language acquisition is also a question that triggered many studies in different disciplines. Some natural tendencies in human's allocation of attentional resources have been revealed. What will happen to the process of language acquisition if people manipulate the natural tendencies to certain extent? For example, in L2 acquisition, if people make some typographical changes on the words or sentence structures in text to highlight them in order to attract learners'attention to them, will comprehension of the text be affected? This is the research question of the current study.VanPatten summarized the natural tendencies of how people process linguistic input regarding decoding meaning and attending to form, implying a crucial role of consciousness and attention in SLA. Gass clearly suggested that attention was key to processing input in her model of SLA. These theories are contradictory to what Krashen's proposals about implicit and explicit learning in language acquisition. Long's Focus on form is a pedagogical application of the theories designating an important role to attention, or conscious learning in SLA. He objects the optimal is to focus on form with decoding meaning as premise. Why are some forms more salient to a learner while the others are not? Can the salience be created externally? These are what input enhancement, proposed by Sharwood-Smith, is concerned about. He believes that the salience of some form in input is created by learners'internal learning mechanism, but it can also be created externally. Textual enhancement, created by, say, a language teacher, is an example of the latter.The current study enrolled 37 high school students as participants. The target form chosen here was the use of past perfect and past future perfect as subjunctives in a conditional to form a hypothesis about a condition in the past. Their comprehension of plain passage was compared with one of the passage with treatment. It turned out that textual enhancement had no significant influence on comprehension. The current study was the first one to investigate TE's influence on comprehension through an experiment.