Effects Of Textual Enhancement And Input Flood On Learning Of Manner Adverb Placement

Textual enhancement and input flood alike fit into the category of input enhancement, which is an approach to teaching grammar in which the learner's attention is briefly drawn to a linguistic form in a meaningful context. A number of studies in the input enhancement field have been carried out over the past decades. Most have examined the effects of textual enhancement on processing grammatical elements, few have explored the effects of input flood, and fewer have compared the effects of textual enhancement with those of input flood on processing these grammatical elements. In addition, these studies have reported inconsistent or even conflicting findings. The present study is accordingly carried out to examine the effects of textual enhancement, input flood and textual enhancement combined with input flood on the learning of adverb placement and the corresponding relationship among them. It is expected to provide further evidence to clarify the effects of textual enhancement and input flood on second language learning and acquisition, offering inspiration to help teachers teach grammatical elements more effectively in a meaning-oriented context.The following four research questions are to be addressed for this purpose.1. What are the effects of textual enhancement on the learning of manner adverb placement?2. What are the effects of input flood on the learning of manner adverb placement?3. What are the effects of TE in combination with IF on the learning of manner adverb placement?4. Is there any statistically significant difference among the three treatment conditions in the learning of manner adverb placement?In order to answer these four research questions, a set of experiments are conducted to test out the subjects'performance before and after the treatment. The following procedures are correspondingly adopted and the two major findings are finally obtained.Subjects in the study are 66 non-English major college students and they are selected based on the scores of the pretest and mean scores of the first and the second semesters. They are randomly assigned to three experimental groups after being chosen, namely TE group, IF group, and TE in combination with IF group. They are then required to read total six reading materials with three different versions and finish the corresponding comprehension questions, with three reading materials at a time. They are finally required to take an immediate posttest after they have finished the next reading assignments, testing out the effects of the different treatment conditions on the learning of manner adverb placement.Based on the analysis of the data from the experiments, the following major findings are reached.1. Textual enhancement, input flood and TE in combination with IF are effective in the learning of manner adverb placement, but ineffective in eliminating the non-target interlanguage rules concerning the target forms.2. There is no statistically significant difference among the three treatment conditions in the learning of manner adverb placement.These findings indicate the effects of these input enhancement techniques are closely related to the characteristics of the target forms as well as the characteristics of the subjects investigated, further suggesting the effective application of these input enhancement techniques is conditional rather than unconditional. It also suggests that although compound enhancement is generally more effective than simple enhancement in processing target forms, compound enhancement will not produce statistically significant better performance as opposed to simple enhancement, when the simple enhancement is effective enough in processing the target forms,indicating compound enhancement is not always necessary.