A Study Of Output Hypothesis Functions On Thai Students In The Acquisition Of Chinese Direction Complement

Swain argued in 1985 that language output has noticing function,hypothesis testing function and meta language function in language acquisition.Output hypothesis functions can be further interpreted as firstly,more spoken and written output is to the benefit of linguistic fluency and spontaneity.Secondly,language learners transfer from semantic processing to syntactic processing through language output.Thirdly,to write and speak in the target language enables language learners to do hypothesis testing in the acquisition of target language.Finally,language learners obtain corresponding feedback through language output.The hypothesis has been widely applied to guide second language teaching since then.This paper discuses how Thai students learn directional complement in Chinese under the guidance of output hypothesis.The present research which investigated the 20 six-grade students(in parallel class)in the Public Jianhua School attempts to answer the following questions:1.Does intelligible output task have higher efficiency on the acquisition of directional complement in Chinese language leaning in contrast to the simple task of output?2.Do spoken output and written output produce the same effect on the acquisition of directional complement in Chinese?Methodologies including pretest,training,immediate test,post test and interview are adopted in the present research to ultimately support quantitative and qualitative analysis.Results show that there is a significant difference between the experimental group and the control group,which suggests that intelligible output has higher effectiveness over simple output on the acquisition of directional complement in Chinese language learning.In contrast,the spoken task group has better performance compared to the written task group,which suggests that spoken output is more effective than written output for the students to learn the grammatical form of directional complement.Therefore,it is necessary to strengthen students’ability of expression on the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language is for the purpose of developing communicative competence.In line with the results,we attempt to make some teaching suggestions in the hope of working effectively on the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.