The Application Of Noticing Function To The Teaching Of English Writing In Senior High School

The final objective of English teaching is to cultivate students' abilities to apply English to communication.Among all the abilities,English writing ability is a direct reflection of learners' English acquisition level.In senior high school,however,many students' writing level can not meet the desired writing requirements and they still have many difficulties in English writing.Therefore,it is a very necessary and challenging task for English teachers to help these students improve their English writing ability and arouse their interest in English writing.Swain's Output Hypothesis contains three functions,namely,the “noticing/triggering” function,the “hypothesis-testing” function,and the “metalinguistic” function.The noticing function means that the activity of producing the target language may prompt second language learners to recognize their linguistic problems and bring to their attention what they need in the second language,and as a result,acquisition is facilitated.Currently,the Output Hypothesis is mainly used to study the relationship between language output and second language acquisition.Although there are lots of researches on output and English writing teaching,empirical studies of noticing and its function on English writing are not that enough in China.Based on the noticing function of Output Hypothesis,the present study attempts to investigate the effect of learner-generated noticing on senior high school students' English writing.In this study,four research questions are explored:(1)Do students notice difficulties when writing a passage?(2)What aspects of texts do students notice when they write their first drafts andcompare them with the model writings?(3)Do the training of noticing promote students' writing proficiency?(4)What are students' opinions on writing output task in this study?All the subjects are from Grade 2 of Fushan Senior High School in Linfen.There are120 subjects from two classes taught by the same English teacher and each class includes 60 students.One class is treated as the experimental group,and the other one as the control group.The study lasts for 10 weeks and mainly focuses on a writing task which includes a first writing output,comparison,and a second writing output within 90 minutes.During the whole research procedure,every other week the students in both groups were required to write a composition of 100 words.The experimental group was trained to experience three stages in the experiment.The first was to write and note down the problematic features noticed,the second to compare the original draft with one model essay and note down any features noticed in the model,and the third to write a final composition.The control group was asked to write on a topic twice alone.The students in both groups took two tests(pre-test and post-test)on English writing and the experimental group had one questionnaire about their attitude towards English writing after the experiment.And the data was collected and categorized and the analysis was conducted by SPSS 17.0.The results of this study can be shown in the following aspects.Firstly,during the writing stage and comparison one,students noticed lexical features most,which meant that they placed great emphasis on vocabulary when writing.Secondly,features of the models related to the problems that were noticed in the first writing were incorporated at a higher rate than unrelated features into students' final writings.Thirdly,through pre-test and post-test,the subjects in the experimental group wrote better than those in the control group.Therefore,it can be concluded that noticing had a constructive and dominant effect on writing.Furthermore,modeling was an effective feedback method to promote students' noticing in English writing.Finally,the majority of subjects thought this study offered great help to them.The results indicate the important function of noticing and the positive effect of output on language learning.The findings also reveal that spontaneous noticing of linguistic features allow learners to decide on the linguistic features that they really need and then help learners improve their subsequent learning.