A Study Of The Effects Of Textual Enhancement On The Noticing And Learning Of English Present Continuous Tense By Junior High School Students

Since Schmidt put forward "Noticing Hypothesis",many researchers have paid more attention to how to improve the second language learners' noticing and learning of the language forms and carried out plenty of empirical researches in recent years.Meanwhile,Sharwood Smith proposed the implicit teaching method "Input Enhancement",which can facilitate the ESL learners to notice and learn the linguistic forms,and this method has attracted the attention of many researchers.Therefore,many researchers have begun to research the effectiveness of textual enhancement on the noticing and learning of the linguistic forms by the second language learners,but the results of them are not consistent.Therefore,on the basis of Schmidt's "Noticing Hypothesis" and Krashen's"Comprehensible Input Hypothesis" the current study researched whether textual enhancement can attract the learners' attention on the present continuous tense and whether it can better improve the learners' learning on the present continuous tense.This study investigated the effect of textual enhancement on the noticing and learning of English present continuous tense in 100 students from two classes in Grade Seven.The experiment started in March,2017 in a junior high school in Shenzhen and lasted for 5 weeks.The experiment included two groups:One group was experimental group,namely,Enhanced Group,who received enhanced reading materials.While the other was control group,namely,Non-enhanced Group,who received non-enhanced reading materials,which are same as the experimental group in the experiment.The experiment also conducted three tests and a questionnaire.After the analysis of all the data by SPSS19.0,the results demonstrated that the enhanced group outperformed the control group in post-tests.Therefore,textual enhancement was found to facilitate the noticing and learning of English present continuous tense by the junior high school students.As a result,in grammar teaching,the teachers are supposed to provide comprehensible input and highlight some linguistic forms appropriately as much as possible for the students,to direct their attention in meaningful context and raise their grammar consciousness,and thus to facilitate the learners' learning of the target forms.