The Effects Of Textual Enhancement Input And Textual Written Reconstruction On The Noticing And Acquisition Of English Present Perfect By Junior Middle School Students

In the field of the study of the second language acquisition, the scholars focused on theinvestigation on the acquisition of the language meaning in the past time, while they paidattention to how to improve the second language learners’ noticing and acquisition of thelinguistic forms and conducted a lot of investigation in the recent years. The effect of thenoticing on the second language acquisition is a controversial topic in the field of the secondlanguage acquisition. However, a great number of the scholars believe that the noticing isnecessary for the second language acquisition. The previous empirical studies demonstratedthat the noticing was necessary and sufficient for the second language learners to acquire thelinguistic forms. Therefore, the scholars began to investigate how to improve the learners’noticing which facilitated the learners’ acquisition of the linguistic forms. The results of therelevant studies revealed that textual enhancement input and textual written reconstructioncould improve the learners’ noticing of the target forms. This thesis will continue toinvestigate whether textual enhancement input and textual written reconstruction in isolationor in combination could improve the noticing and acquisition of the English present perfect bythe Junior Middle School students.According to the research purpose of this thesis, the author proposed three followingissues:1) Could the accomplishment of the output task (textual written reconstruction) have apositive impact on the learners’ noticing and acquisition of the English present perfect incomparison with the accomplishment of the non-output task (reading comprehension)?2) Could textual enhancement input have a positive impact on the learners’ noticing andacquisition of the English present perfect in comparison with the unenhanced input?3) Could the combination of the output task(textual written reconstruction) and textualenhancement input have a positive impact on the learners’ noticing and acquisition of theEnglish present perfect in comparison with accomplishing the output task (textual writtenreconstruction) without the textual enhancement input or using the method of textualenhancement input without the output task? In this study, one hundred and seven students in Grade Three from the Zhong Zhi JuniorMiddle School in Shuang Cheng city took part in this experiment. This experiment started inSeptember,2013and lasted for five weeks. These subjects were divided into four treatmentgroups and one control group. The four treatment groups were the+O+IE group,+O-IE group,-O+IE group and-O-IE group. There were three tests (pretest, immediate posttest and delayedposttest) and two questionnaires (designed according to the different tasks of the experiment)in this study.The results of the experiment demonstrated:1) The output (textual written reconstruction) could have a positive impact on thelearners’ noticing of the forms of the target language while it could not be confirmed that thenoticing generated by the output (textual written reconstruction) could facilitate the learners’acquisition of the target forms.2) The textual enhancement input could play a positive role in the learners’ noticing ofthe forms of the target language. However, it could not be confirmed that the noticingattracted by textual enhancement input could have a positive effect on the learners’subsequent production and acquisition of the target forms.3) The two methods of textual enhancement input and the output (textual writtenreconstruction) in combination could perform better than the two methods in isolation inencouraging the subjects’ attention to the forms of the target language while it could not beconfirmed that the two methods in combination could perform better than the two methods inisolation in facilitating the subjects’ acquisition of the target forms.