The Effects Of Textual Enhancement On Chinese English Learners’ Noticing Andacquisition On The Target Linguistic Form

Since the noticing hypothesis proposed, effects of noticing on the secondlanguage acquisition had been the research focal in the field of second languageacquisition. To increase the noticing of the target linguistic form of second languagelearners so that benefit the acquisition, the investigations on effects of enhancing andmanipulating input with implicitly approaches and explicitly approaches emerged.Explicitly approaches include traditional grammar instruction which is the mostcommon used teaching technique. And the implicit approaches are recently theinteresting of the researchers of input enhancement which include the textualenhancement. Since1990s, input enhancement has spurred considerable research.Most of the studies in this field involved controlled experiments in a meaningfulcontext, statistical and correlational analysis of pretest-posttest data. To inspect theeffect of input enhancement on noticing of target linguistic forms, extensive empiricalstudies have yielded a spectrum of findings. Most researchers take syntactic andmorphological element as the enhanced target linguistic form such like relativeclauses, possessive determiners past participle agreement for the nature of visualsalience and frequent occurrence and use. Based on the previous studies andresearches under the topic of input enhancement, the current study attempts to studythe effects of textual enhancement on noticing and the consequent learning of targetlinguistic form of learners. The research questions mainly include the following three:1) Whether textual enhancement impact the noticing of target linguistic formssignificantly on drawing learners’ attention into the grammar features from thecomprehension of the input? Comparing to rule instruction the most commonly usedgrammar teaching approach, whether textual enhancement outperformed onadvancing the noticing and acquisition of target linguistic forms of second languagelearners?2) Does textual enhancement affect the immediate acquisition of target linguisticforms great of second language learners?3) Among the rule instruction, textual enhancement+the rule instruction andtextual enhancement, which approach facilitates the noticing of target linguistic formsof learners most?To answer these questions the hypotheses match to each research questions arelisted as following:1) The effects of textual enhancement on target linguistic forms of learnerssignificantly promoted the noticing of it on inviting the attention of learners to linguistic form. The textual enhancement outperformed the rule instruction onadvancing noticing and acquisition of target linguistic forms of learners.2) The textual enhancement proved the immediate acquisition of targetlinguistic forms of learners.3) The rule instruction+textual enhancement would the most advancedapproach on increasing the noticing of target linguistic forms of learners among therule instruction, textual enhancement and itself.The current study is empirical. Two hundred high school senior students wereemployed as the subjects in this research. The subjects of this research were dividedinto four groups and they would receive rule instruction, textual enhancement, andrule instruction+textual enhancement in order to deliver the empirical data for theresult of this research. Textual enhancement group would receive the typographicallyenhanced text while the rule instruction group would receive same content but notypographically enhanced input material. Rule instruction group received grammarinstruction of the target linguistic form before the test. Rule instruction+textualenhancement group received the grammar instruction and the typographicallyenhanced input material in the research. And besides the mentioned three groups theforth group was control group which received no enhanced input.The target linguistic form employed in this research is the hypotheticalconditional with if leading clause. Celce-Murica and Larsen-Freeman claimed that theconditional sentence in general and specifically hypothetical or counterfactualconditionals render second language learners in a more difficult situation of learningand acquisition motivated the choice of target form. Different with others, conditionalsentences contain a main sentence and a clause which particularly for target form hereare an if leading clause and a main sentence. The complex structure of conditionalsentence would cause the mastery of it one more degree required than others forlearners which involves proficiency of tense system and modal auxiliaries. Tense inimaginative conditionals is also a trick for second language learners especiallyChinese learners which their first language are far different from the target languagein aspect of this. In high school, generally senior had already completed the grammarlearning in English. Hypothetical conditional had been taught in the second year ofhigh school. Nevertheless, for agreement of difficulty of proficiency on hypotheticalconditional, most learners have not mastered it appropriately. They aredevelopmentally ready to acquire the hypothetical condition. Learning from someformer researches demonstrated that, target form with slightly communicative valuecould influence the negative results of treatment according to Wong’s study in2003on research with past participle agreement of French in relative clause constructions.Hypothetical conditional is common usage in English which have greatcommunicative value among the structures of all. In a meaning-oriented inputmaterial, it would facilitate the comprehension of the understanding of context forlearners. Upon the consideration mentioned above, the hypothetical conditional withif leading clause can be suitable for target linguistic form choice in the current study.A pretest, an immediate posttest, a delayed posttest and a questionnaireconstituted the experiment. The data collected based on the scores which came from the tests contained in the posttests. The SPSS was adopted as the measure for the dataanalysis in this study to verify the significant difference between the groups. And thefindings of the current research are listed as followings:1) The textual enhancement promoted the noticing of the target linguistic formin this research. Comparing to the textual enhancement, rule instruction increases thenoticing and acquisition of the target linguistic form greater in this research.2) The textual enhancement benefited the immediate acquisition of the targetlinguistic form in the present study.3) The rule instruction+textual enhancement approach was proved facilitatingthe noticing of the target linguistic form most significantly among the rule instruction,textual enhancement and itself.At the end of the thesis, findings on theoretical and empirical were summarizedas well as the implications and limitations of the study.