A Comparative Study Of The Effects Of Textual Enhancement And Input Flood On Senior High School Students’ Acquisition Of If Conditionals

Textual enhancement and input flood are two implicit teaching techniques: the former means attracting learners’ attention to the target form with the purpose of helping learners to acquire it through enhanced ways like bolding,italicizing,underlining and so on;the latter refers to modify the reading text for adding more numbers of target form than before on the basis of not changing the meaning of the original text to achieve the aim of attracting learners’ attention and helping learners to acquire the target form.This thesis aims at exploring the comparative effect of textual enhancement and input flood on senior high school students’ acquisition of if conditionals through an experiment.Based on this,the thesis addresses two research questions:(1)Between textual enhancement and input flood,which one is better in improving senior high school students’ comprehension of if conditionals?(2)Between textual enhancement and input flood,which one is better in improving senior high school students’ production of if conditionals?Seventy-one participants who came from two intact classes in Grade two of the First Senior High School of Leizhou were divided into two groups: textual enhancement group and input flood group.Although the experiment adopted three instruments: reading comprehension test,grammaticality tests(comprehension and production tests of if conditionals)and questionnaire for measuring participants’ noticing,participants in different groups finished different reading comprehension tests,which is mainly reflected in the adjustment of if conditionals: participants in textual enhancement group finished reading comprehension test with bolded,underlined and enlarged if conditionals while participants in input flood group finished reading comprehension test with more exemplars of if conditionals than those of textual enhancement group: the number of if conditionals in textual enhancement group is 35 while in input flood group is 100 which is nearly three times more than the former.With regard to data analysis,the thesis adopted independent-samples t-tests,paired-samples t-tests,and frequency analyses.It turned out that:(1)Between textual enhancement and input flood,input flood is better in improving senior high school students’ comprehension of if conditionals;(2)Between textual enhancement and input flood,input flood is better in improving senior high school students’ production of if conditionals.The experiment proves J.White’s(1998),Han et al.’(2008),Reinders and R.Ellis’(2009)hypotheses to some extent that input flood is better in helping second language learners to acquire target forms than textual enhancement.Therefore,it provides teachers and materials writers with some suggestions like considering using more input flood.At the same time,they can employ textual enhancement moderately for in this way,not only it helps to overcome the shortcoming causing by the overuse of input flood(the shortcoming is: students read for the acquisition of target forms,while they do not read for reading),but also it guarantees the diversification of teaching techniques.