| Textual enhancement thinks highly of the equal importance of language form and meaning and is considered as being able to promote students' acquisition of linguistic forms in reading without the interruption of meaning understanding of text messages,thus to facilitate equally students' development on the two aspects. In recent years, many researchers at home and abroad have devoted their interest to textual enhancement to investigate its effectiveness on grammar instruction, such as English passive voice,attributive clause and different tenses in either college students or middle school students.But no empirical study has been done to testify its effectiveness on English non-finite verbs instruction and its relationship with students' varied perceptual learning styles.Based on the framework of Noticing Hypothesis and Comprehensible Input Hypothesis, this dissertation attempted to experiment on textual enhancement on Grade Eleven students in senior high school to further testify its effects on the acquisition of English non-finite verbs,especially with students of different perceptual learning styles.97 Grade Eleven students in two classes were chosen as subjects, and Class One was the experimental group(47 students) which applied textual enhancement and was given Oxford's Perceptual Styles surveys while Class Two was the control group(50 students)which was instructed without experiment measures but they received the same reading materials. Based on the scores of pretest and post-test, independent and paired samples t-test were conducted to examine whether the difference from pretest to post-test in both groups was significant after a five-week experimental treatment. In addition, according to the questionnaire results, which showed that there were 19 visual learners, 18 auditory learners and 10 haptic learners in Group One, a one-way ANOVA was conducted to investigate whether the difference was significant among varied perceptual learning style students. The results showed that even though both groups improved a lot in post-test,participants given textual enhancement made greater progress than participants in the control group who did not receive textual enhancement. What's more, among three kinds of perceptual learning styles(visual, auditory, haptic), textual enhancement can contribute most to visual learners' acquisition of target linguistic forms, although othertwo types of students also gained great improvement.All the research results indicated that textual enhancement is an effective way to instruct senior high school students to study English non-finite verbs as post-modifiers.The results of questionnaire revealed that visual learners benefit most from the instruction with textual enhancement, but it does not need to be limited to visual learners, for it still can work out in other perceptual learning styles students. Based on those findings above,some points in teaching with textual enhancement should be kept in mind as follows: 1.teachers are expected to provide as much comprehensible input with enhanced forms as possible and make clear explanations on the meaning of enhanced parts. 2. rule explanation is still indispensable because textual enhancement is just a supplementary way to help students strengthen new knowledge. 3. students' perceptual learning styles can actually influence their performance when using textual enhancement, so teachers need to pay more attention and provide more opportunities to auditory and haptic learners to help them overcome the difficulties caused by their personal perceptual learning styles. |
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