An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Textual Enhancement On Senior High School Students' Acquisition Of The Attributive Clauses

Textual enhancement refers to an implicit technique to enhance the saliency of the target form with typographical cues,which includes: CAPITALIZING,bold facing,italicizing,underlying,and other strategies such as color-coding or using different sizes or types of fonts.One fundamental assumption of textual enhancement is that it can facilitate learner's acquisition of the target form embedded in a meaning-oriented reading text by inducing their attention to the enhanced form and subsequently triggering a chain of cognitive processes initiated by noticing.This experimental study attempts to investigate the effects of textual enhancement on senior high school students' acquisition of the attributive clauses.The effects on acquisition are going to be examined and analyzed from the two dimensions:comprehension and production.The present study aims to answer these two research questions: 1)What are the effects of textual enhancement on senior high school students' comprehension of the attributive clauses? 2)What are the effects of textual enhancement on senior high school students' production of the attributive clauses?An intact class in Yingde Senior High School located in Qingyuan City participated in this experimental study.It comprised a total of 46 Senior One students,who were divided into the experimental group(with textual enhancement)and the control group(without textual enhancement).Three instruments were employed in this study,i.e.,grammaticality tests about the attributive clauses,a reading comprehension test,and a questionnaire for the effects on noticing.During the reading comprehension test,the experimental group were exposed to the enhancement of the target form embedded in the reading text,while the control group were exposed to the same text in baseline form.Independent samples t-tests,paired samples t-tests,and frequency analysis are conducted to analyze the collected data and produce the following major findings: 1)textual enhancement has positive effects on senior high school students' acquisition of the attributive clauses;2)the positive effects of textual enhancement on senior high school students' acquisition of the attributive clauses are not durable,especially ontheir production.This study has confirmed the validity of Sharwood's input enhancement hypothesis to some extent with empirical evidences.Besides,it provides English teachers in senior high schools with some useful insights and suggestions based on the underlying issues revealed in this results: 1)the target form employed should be a form which students have some prior knowledge of,and alternatively,textual enhancement can be used in combination with explicit grammar instruction in which students can acquire some prior knowledge of the target form;2)teachers can try using different kinds of textual enhancement techniques to make the target form more salient;3)the reading text in which the target form is embedded should be of an appropriate difficulty level for students.