| Since Krashen put forward the Comprehensible Input hypothesis in 1980 s, it has played an important role in second language acquisition and foreign language teaching. In China, English language teachers pay much attention to language input and neglect language output. The “cramming education” and “dumb English” are common phenomena in China. Students are weak in producing English no matter in oral or written English.In 1985, Swain proposed the comprehension output hypothesis. Many researchers have conducted a lot of empirical studies to investigate the effect of output on second language acquisition(SLA) and these results are indeed positive. However, most of their studies focus on the noticing and acquisition of past hypothetical conditional. It is not adequate to confine target forms to past hypothetical conditional in order to testify the effects of output on SLA. This present study tends to enrich relevant empirical basis for output from the perspective of English relative clause(RC).The research questions are:1) Compared with the input task, does the output task promote the noticing of the form of relative clause?2) Compared with the input task, does the output task facilitate the acquisition of the form of relative clause?In this study, 53 subjects were all intermediate learners(sophomore students)from non-English major in Jiangxi Normal University, who had learned the target form but had difficulty in using it accurately. They were divided into two groups randomly, 25 for experimental group(EG) and 28 for control group(CG). Participants in EG were involved to complete reconstruction tasks, while participants in CG should perform comprehension tasks after reading an input material and taking notes of what they thought were beneficial to complete reconstruction task and comprehension task correspondingly. The analysis of subjects’ note taking and reconstruction task is used to examine the effects of output on noticing of relative clause. At last, both of the groups had to finish a post-test and a delayed post-test to testify the effects of output task on acquisition of relative clause.The major findings are below:1. With regard to the effects of output task on the noticing of English relativeclause, the results showed that there was a significant improvement in note-taking task by EG, compared with CG. Furthermore, participants in EG performed better in the second reconstruction task than in the first reconstruction task. Thus, output task helped to promote the noticing of the form of relative clause.2. As for the effects of output task on the acquisition of English relative clause,this study displayed no statistically significant difference between the two groups. But in the light of the effect size between pretest and immediate post-test, output task exerted some effects on the acquisition of target form to some extent.The findings of this study, to some extent, confirm and enrich the important role of output in SLA. It also has pedagogical implications about enhancing the application of output tasks in language learning, applying output-input-output pattern in English learning and designing elaborate output tasks in English learning in China. |
