A Study On The Effects Of Input And Output On Noticing And Learning Depth Of Vocabulary Knowledge By Senior High School Learners

Noticing in this thesis refers to a kind of focal attention which is a subject's consciously selective attention towards stimuli and the ability to rehearse these stimuli.Noticing is an important mechanism of language learning as well as information processing.The studies of noticing have gone through two stages,the stage of theoretical studies and the stage of empirical studies.At the stage of theoretical studies,researchers have a heated discussion about what is noticing on earth,what promotes noticing and whether noticing of different quantities and qualities is needed for different language items.At the stage of empirical studies,researchers conduct experiments about the effects of noticing on different language items,attempting to find out the best form to achieve noticing and learning.Vocabulary is the building block of English learning.When it comes to vocabulary knowledge,the cognition of vocabulary knowledge is still vocabulary size,in another word,the breadth of vocabulary.In senior high school English teaching,neither teachers nor students have a good knowledge of the depth of vocabulary knowledge,which leads to the lack of productivity.In this background,this thesis is based on the Noticing Hypothesis proposed by Schmidt(1991)and adapts Izumi(2002)'s experiment about the effects of noticing on other language items,applying the experimental method to investigating the effects of noticing and learning on the depth of vocabulary knowledge by senior high school learner according to different input and output conditions.The data consist of Vocabulary Knowledge Scale(Paribakht and Wesche 1993)and participants 'noticing notes and then are analyzed by SPSS.The major findings are presented as follows:1.Input enhancement facilitates noticing at a superficial level.Although this technique does highlight the target word,what they mainly notice focuses on the form of a word(orthographic features)and only little of this noticing turns into intake.2.Output plays a vital role in noticing and learning English depth of vocabulary knowledge.Output is an activity in need of much thinking and cognitive comparison,which is conducive to noticing the gap between the interlanguage and the target language.In the process of output,senior high learners shift their attention from focusing on form to focusing on meaning.This corresponds with a deep level of noticing,which means that learners notice and learn various facets of a word(collocation,meaning and appropriateness).3.The joint effects of input and output techniques are so huge that they reinforce noticing,catalyze input-intake transition and benefit the retention of long-term memory.4.In addition,the thesis considers feedback as a corrective input.An immediate feedback deepens and enriches their understanding of the target words,which will intensify noticing and learning on correct forms and meanings of the target words.The experiment shows that output integrates with immediate feedback constituting the best environment to notice and learn the depth of vocabulary knowledge.