The Empirical Study About Effects Of Textual Enhancement On Junior School Students' English Attributive Clause Structure Acquisition And Reading Comprehension

The relationship between attention and language acquisition is one of the most controversial issues in the second language acquisition research. Textual enhancement is an important researching field concerning the relationship between attention and language acquisition. Among them, the textual enhancement can be used to strengthen and improve learners' attention to the form of the target language and contribute to the acquisition of the language structure. In reading passage, however, it is difficult to guarantee that the learners themselves redistributed their limited attention between the language structure and the meaning of the text in the process of reading simultaneously; therefore, this issue is the focus of this research. In English learning, the complex structure is always a difficult point for learners, but the understanding of the complex structure is essential for the understanding of the whole passage. On the basis of summarizing the researches at home and abroad, taking the attributive clause as example, this paper tries to study the effect of textual enhancement on the acquisition of the attributive clause and reading comprehension and the relationship between them. In this paper, the main research issues include the following: whether textual enhancement can improve students' acquisition of the form of attributive clause; whether textual enhancement can improve students' reading comprehension, if yes, globally or locally; whether there is a correlation between acquisition of attributive clause and comprehension of the passage under the textual enhancement.This study is a quasi-experimental study. The participants are students in the 9th grade who are divided into two groups, namely an experimental group and a control group. Experimental group will read the passage with the textual enhancement through boldfacing, i.e. attributive clauses in the reading passage are reinforced in boldfacing. In the control group, the same passage as the experimental group is used but attributive clauses are not reinforced at all. The experiment consists of four stages, pre-test, two other exposure sessions and post-test with duration of one week. In the pretest no enhancement is used just for the purpose of assessing the students of two groups are on the same level. Two exposure sessions are used to let students of EG be acquainted with textual enhancement. The format of posttest is the same with pretest, participants were given 10 minutes to read the same reading material(enhanced for experimental group vs. unenhanced for control group) and then do tests according to the reading material. The test includes two parts:, grammar test and reading comprehension test. In grammar part, there are ten attributive clauses with ten blanks to be filled with appropriate relative pronouns. Each blank scores two points with a total of twenty points. In reading comprehension part, five statements are to be judged true or false according to the understanding of the passage. Each statement scores one point. And a cloze summary which tests the detailed understanding of the text scores 15 points.SPSS is employed as instrument of data analysis, independent sample t-test, paired sample t-test are adopted to examine the significant difference between groups and within group. The correlation analysis is adopted to testify the correlation between the acquisition of attributive clause structure and reading comprehension of the text. The results of the research are followed:1) Textual enhancement could promote the learners' acquisition of grammar.2) Textual enhancement would hinder the learners' reading comprehension, especially global understanding.3) There is no obvious correlation between the learners' acquisition of attributive clause and reading comprehension in the context of textual enhancement.The research results show that the textual enhancement can effectively arouse learners' attention to the attributive clause so as to promote the learners' acquisition on attributive clause, especially the use of relative pronoun, but it would hinder the learners' global understanding to the text, at least, it might distract the learners' attention to the meaning.