A Study Of The Effects Of Textual Enhancement And Output On English Beginners

It is widely acknowledged that noticing is indispensable for learning to occur.Therefore,how to draw learners' attention to target forms has been extensively studied in foreign language teaching.This study examines the potentially facilitative effects of internal and external attention-drawing devices – output and textual enhancement – on the noticing and learning of English past tense with-ed form by beginners learning English as a foreign language(EFL).The study addresses two points in detail.One is whether the behavior of producing output improves noticing of formal elements in the target language(TL)input and affects the subsequent learning of the target form.The other is whether such noticing and learning induced by the act of output,if any,would be the same as that affected by textual enhancement which is designed to attract learners' attention to problematic form features in the input.These questions were examined in an experimental study where the requirement of output and the exposure to enhanced input were systematically varied.Four experimental group and a control group are included in the experiment.A reading comprehension task was used as the way to present the target form input materials.The pre-,postand delayed post-tests were designed to measure the learning of the target form while the note taking and reconstruction results were to assess the noticing.The major findings are:(1)Textual enhancement has a positive effect on increasing the noticing of the target form with high communicative value.One important finding is that textual enhancement alone has a significant effect on the noticing of target form with high communicative value over the effect of textual enhancement combined with output.(2)The combination of output and textual enhancement has a better effect on noticing of the target form than output alone since both of them can guide learners to attend to the target form,and this attention is relatively limited.However,output alone cannot well make learners focus on a specific target form because the attentional resource is easily distracted by other disturbing factors.(3)Output combined with textual enhancement facilitates the learning of the target form best.Both of them can guide the learners to allocate their attention to the target form,thus form a deeper level of noticing,leading to the learning of the target form.(4)Textual enhancement alone contributes to more learning of the target form of high communicative value than merely output.Though both of them are attention-drawing devices,textual enhancement makes the target forms more salient and the attentional resource more intensive.(5)The delayed posttest shows that textual enhancement has a certain delaying effect in terms of the learning of target form with high communicative value while other treatments not.Besides,there are some pedagogical implications for Chinese foreign language teaching.As for linguistic forms of high communicative value,teachers should attach great importance to the role of output and textual enhancement in learning.Meanwhile,other factors affecting output,such as task characteristics,task demands,feedback and rehearsal,should also be addressed.