An Experimental Study Into Input Enhancement On Noticing And Acquisition Of Exclamatory Sentence For Chinese Middle School English Learners

Currently, there have been lots of studies carried out in the domain of input enhancement and they have made a deep exploration of each input enhancement variation. However, most of them focused on a single input method of enhancement and few of them attempted to make a comparison between more than one input enhancement methods. Apart from this, the results of their experiments are mixed. In order to further examine the function of input enhancement strategies, the author takes “Noticing Hypothesis” and “Input Enhancement” as the theoretical basis to conduct an experimental study. In the study, the author takes the exclamatory sentence(beginning with what and how) in English as the target form to investigate the effects of different input enhancement strategies on learners’ noticing and acquisition of the target form. Three types of input enhancement strategies are adopted: Recitation, Noted Text Input Enhancement and Text Input Enhancement. The present study intends to focus on the following questions:(1) What influence are made by input enhancement on learners’ noticing of exclamatory sentence?(2) What influence are made by input enhancement on learners’ acquisition of exclamatory sentence?(3) What are the different influences between enhanced input and unenhanced intact input on learners’ noticing and acquisition?Altogether 60 Grade-8-level students take part in this study, and they are from four homogeneous and intact classes. They are divided into four groups: three treatment groups and one control group. The contents of the input reading materials for them are the same. The differences lie in: the Text Input Enhancement Group read the text material which the target forms are enhanced(underlined, italicized and bolded); the Noted Text Input Enhancement Group read the text material which is not only enhanced like The Text Input Group, but also added with the relevant notes to explain the target forms; the Recitation Group read the normal text without any enhancement and then recite the text in the designed time. The Control Group only read the normal text without any enhancement.In the whole experiment, the groups are asked to have noticing test, immediate acquisition test and delayed acquisition test. SPSS19.0 is used to analyze the data collected from the tests in the study. Based on the analysis of the experimental data, the results are shown in detail:(1) Input enhancement has significantly promoted the learners to pay attention to the exclamatory sentence, and each input enhancement variation makes effects to different degrees. Noted text input enhancement and recitation gain the strongest promotion and the text input enhancement follows.(2) Input enhancement has significantly promoted the learners to acquire the exclamatory sentence, and each input enhancement variation takes effects to different degrees. Noted text input enhancement gains the strongest promotion, the second is recitation and text input enhancement is the third.(3) According to the comparison between the enhanced group and the unenhanced group, the former brings an obvious promotion and takes a positive effect.