An Empirical Study On The Acquisition Of Past Perfect Tense Of High School Student

In the early1980s, the American linguist Krashen proposed the Second Language Acquisition Theory.He pointed out that Input was the key factor and necessary condition for the learners to study in the secondlanguage acquisition. Richard Schmidt proposed the “Noticing Hypothesis” in1990which firstlyemphasized the core function of noticing in the second language acquisition. Richard Schmidt putforward that it was only the noticing language input that could be received and effectively processed by thelearners. Noticing function determines what kind of language input should be concerned and then beprocessed. The noticing mechanism plays a very important role in the second language acquisitionresearch.Based on the theoretical foundation of Input Hypothesis and Noticing Hypothesis, the experimentstudy was designed to research the acquisition of past perfect tense of high school student. In the research,60students were selected from one of the high schools in Shan Xi province, and they were divided into twogroups: contrastive group and experimental group. The students were required to take part in thefollowing activities: answering questionnaires, participating in experiments, re-constructing input materialand taking tests. In the experimental phrase, the two noticing methods of “form-centered” and“meaning-centered” were executed in the experimental group and contrastive group respectively. What’smore, the statistical software of SPSS17.0and EXCEL were used to deal with the data.With a series of research sections carrying out, the present research attempted to answer the followingthree research questions:1. Which one (“meaning-centered” noticing or “form-centered” noticing) can better arouse thelearners’ noticing of the target form?2. Which noticing method (“meaning-centered” noticing or “form-centered” noticing) is moreefficient in improving the learners’ interest and confidence during the target form learning?3. What is the relationship between “meaning-centered” noticing and “form-centered” noticing inthe process of past perfect tense acquisition?The data analysis results indicated that the “form-centered” noticing method was more effective thanthe “meaning-centered” noticing method in the acquisition of past perfect tense. Also the “form-centered” noticing method could better improve the students’ interest and confidence than the “meaning-centered”noticing method in the past perfect tense acquisition process. In addition, the results showed that the“form-centered” noticing method and “meaning-centered” noticing method were positively correlated (thecoefficient r=.425*in the re-construction phrase; the coefficient r=.337*in the test phrase).