Effects Of Textual Enhancement On Chinese Students' Use Of Relative Clauses

The aim of this study was to examine the effects of textual enhancement on Chinese students'use of relative clauses. Specifically, three formats of textual enhancement, namely boldface, italics and underlines, were used to find out the extent to which textual enhancement could influence the use of the target grammatical form.The data from four intact classes of 120 EFL students at Nanjing Medical University were elicited using three assessment measures:blank filling test, grammaticality judgment test and multiple-choice reading comprehension test. The four classes were randomly divided into three experimental groups and one control group, with 30 subjects per group. Statistical analyses were performed using paired t-tests and one-way ANOVA followed by post hoc tests. The study yielded the following major findings:Firstly, the study revealed that textual enhancement significantly fostered the use of relative clauses. The subjects'attention could be directed to the visually enhanced form and content of the text simultaneously. Subjects were exposed to the textually enhanced form in the process of comprehension without any grammatical instruction, which greatly helped the noticing of the target form and encouraged further cognitive processing. Therefore, textual enhancement, an operation that augments the saliency of the target form, promoted greater use of relative clauses. Despite the fact that the subjects'limited attentional resources were partly drawn to the target form in the process of comprehension, textual enhancement caused minimal interruption to meaning comprehension.Secondly, three formats of textual enhancement created varied effects on Chinese students'use of relative clauses. Among the three common techniques for lending emphasis to text, boldface helped to make the target form stand out the most from text and thus proved to be the most effective format of textual enhancement.Lastly, textual enhancement also influenced Chinese students'use of different types of relative clauses. Textual enhancement greatly promoted the use of the type of relative clauses which is the easiest for the Chinese students to acquire. However, the effect was not equally obvious for other more difficult types. At the same time, the results specifically reflected that there is a learning order of different types of relative clauses for Chinese students and this order of difficulty conforms to the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH) which predicts the difficulty order of acquisition of relative clauses.The findings of the present study indicated that textual enhancement facilitated students'use of grammatical forms. The findings also lent support to Long's (1991) "focus on form" and Sharwood Smith's (1991) "input enhancement" In the present study, just as proposed by Long (1991), students allocated their attention to the textually enhanced form while maintaining an overriding focus on meaning comprehension. Furthermore, as expected, textual enhancement, a technique of input enhancement, successfully gained the learners'attention to the target form by increasing its visual saliency. Therefore, it is hoped that the results can provide practical implications for language teachers to integrate grammar instruction into meaning-focused lessons.