A Study Of Textual Enhancement And Topic Familiarity On The Effects Of Junior High School Students' Acquisition Of Passive Voice In Dictogloss

It has been a heated discussion on whether “focus-on-forms” or “focus-on-meaning” in grammar teaching.Michiel Long(1988,1991)put forward “focus on form” which proposes that attracting learners attention to forms in meaningful communication by applying certain techniques and means in communicative-oriented class.It combines “focus-on-forms” and “focus-on-meaning” to compensate each other.Inspired by the “focus on form” an instruction called dictoglosss(DG)appeared in grammar teaching class.DG will be applied in the present study to examine its effect on middle school students' acquisition of passive voice.To make the present study more creative,two variables:textual enhancement and topic familiarity and two levels are added.Sang-Ki Lee's study(2007)shows that textual enhancement do have effect on learners' acquisition of passive voice.However,there are a few studies investigate the combined effect of textual enhancement and topic familiarity at home,not to mention the studies which aims to examine the effects of textual enhancement and topic familiarity on the EFL learners' acquisition of English passive voice.In this study,four research questions are put forward:(1)In dictogloss,under the enhanced format,which kind of text(familiar topic or unfamiliar topic)will enhance students' acquisition of passive voice?(2)In dictogloss,under the unenhanced format,which kind of text(familiar topic or unfamiliar topic)will enhance students' acquisition of passive voice?(3)In dictogloss,under the same familiar topic text,which text format(enhanced text or unenhanced text)will enhance students' acquisition of passive voice?(4)In dictogloss,under the same unfamiliar topic text,which text format(enhanced text or unenhanced text)will enhance students' acquisition of passive voice?Two intact classes with 120 learners from Grade eight who have just learned about English passive voice and have grasped the past participle form of verbs but have not grasped the target grammatical structure very well participate in the experiment.They are randomly appointed as topic familiar class A and topic unfamiliar class B.Within class A,students are further divided into half,textual enhanced group(A1)vs.unenhanced group(A2)according to the ANOVA analysis of the pretest.The same process goes for Class B,textual enhancement group(B1)vs.unenhanced group(B2).After DG are carried out in four groups,15 items of error correction task and a story translation task are employed respectively to examine whether there are any differences among 4 groups performance on English passive voice.After data analysis by Independent Samples t-test of SPSS 13.0,the results are as follows:(1)In dictogloss,when learners receiving the same enhanced text,there is no significant difference between topic familiar group and topic unfamiliar group;(2)In dictogloss,when learners receiving the same unenhanced text,there is no significant difference between the topic familiar group and topic unfamiliar group;(3)In dictogloss,when learners receiving the same familiar topic text,there is a great significant difference between the enhanced and unenhanced group;(4)In dictogloss,when learners receive the same unfamiliar topic text,there is a great significant difference between the enhanced and unenhanced group.In a word,unfamiliar topic plus enhanced format is the best combination.The effectiveness of the 4 interventions follows the order of B1>A1>A2>B2.The author comes to a conclusion that the textual enhancement plays the most important part in students' acquisition of passive voice,especially in the case of topic unfamiliarity.Although topic familiarity takes a certain effect,its effectiveness is just inferior to textual enhancement.The major findings and pedagogical implications of the study are presented at the end of the thesis.It indicates that textual enhancement is a nice option for teachers to teach grammar in meaning-oriented class.