The Effects Of Input Enhancement On Article Using In Students’ English Writing

Articles that uniquely exist in English are one kind of’form word’. They include a/an, the, and zero article, which are the most commonly used words in English language. In Berry’s (2000) study, he pointed out that the articles’the’,’an’and’a’ take up about8.5percent in a discourse. The English article system is one of the most difficult grammatical elements to learn and to use for Chinese students whose language doesn’t have their counterparts. At the same time, they are also one of the grammatical items which are last acquired by learners in the process of English learning (Master,1990).In foreign countries, studies on learners’article acquisition were carried out much earlier than in China, and their research findings are varied and fruitful. In contrast, such kinds of studies have not received enough attention in China. The studies on article acquisition for both abroad and at home are more or less focused on the following issues:1) misusing articles are very common for Chinese students;2) article errors involve omission of article, confusion of article and article redundancy;3) omission of the articles most frequently occurs;4) the use of ’the’ and ’a’are the most easily confused. Base on the above research results, the author tries to apply the input enhancement technique to teach vocational students’English writing, to investigate the effects on article using.The present thesis is aiming to investigate the effects of input enhancement on the effects of Chinese learners’article’s using in their English writing. The author of the thesis makes a brief introduction of article and article acquisitions for both L1and L2learners, elaborates on the related theories of input enhancement, and reviews the history and development of EA. She also presents the relevant studies both abroad and at home. This study is designed as an experimental research. The subjects are the sophomore students in BEC081and082. All of them have passed the PRETCO A, and their scores being from70to75points, now they are preparing for CET4. In order to make sure the study will be fairly conducted, the author chose the subjects who were in the same writing level. First, the author let students write an essay, and she scored the essays strictly following CET4’s requirements. Essays which scored between5to7(intermediate-level) are picked up as the samples, and writers of these samples are selected as the subjects in this research. Subjects in BEC081belong to the experimental group, while subjects in BEC082belong to the control group. Second, she detects, classifies and analyzes the article errors from the samples, and then the analyzed results are regarded as the pretest result. Third, according to the pretest result, the author designs some exercises to enhance student’s article usage. For the experimental group students, the author employs input enhancement technique; while for the control group, the author adopts the rule explanation technique. The period of the experiment lasted for six weeks. After the enhanced teaching, subjects would have the posttest. Fourth, the author repeats the first and second stage, and then gets the posttest results. At the last step, the author employs SPSS as a mean of data processing. She finds out that both of the groups made a progress in article using, especially, there is a significant difference in the experimental group.The author concludes that input enhancement can reduce students’ article errors in their English writing effectively, and in this research, results show that using input enhancement to teach articles is more efficient than using rule-explanation teaching method, so she suggests that teachers adopt input enhancement as a new teaching method.