Effects Of Visual Enhancement On Foreign Language Learning For English Beginners

Visual enhancement is an effective approach to promote the perception of grammatical forms.Since Schmidt put forward "Noticing Hypothesis" in 2001,more and more scholars have begun to explore the effects of visual enhancement on learners’ noticing of target forms and language acquisition.Prior studies shown that subjects among those studies were mainly learners at middle level,such as middle school students,college students or adult learners.Few studies would choose English beginners as research subject.In addition to this fact,no one has taken English past tense as the research object.Therefore,the present study chose English beginners(fourth-grade students)as subject,and the regular form of English past tense as an example.Based on the theoretical basis of "noticing hypothesis" and "information processing mode",it tries to check,for English beginners,whether visual enhancement can promote them to notice and acquire certain grammatical features.This experiment proposes three research questions: 1.Does visual enhancement promote learners’ noticing of grammatical features? 2.Does visual enhancement promote learners’ acquisition of English past tense? 3.Is the degree of acquisition related to the level of noticing?31 fourth-grade students from three parallel classes in an Experimental Primary School in Shanghai were selected as the research object.They were randomly assigned into three groups: 11 students in control group,9 students in the first experimental group and 11 in the second experimental group.The present study designed a pre-test,post-test and six times’ treatments,students in three groups were presented different instruction treatments.At the same time,the experiment also employed a questionnaire survey for all members in enhanced groups.The following findings are drawn: for English beginners,eliminating the interference of previous knowledge,visual enhancement(adjusting font /size)could promote learners’ attention to target language form by enhancing the distinctiveness of the form.Compared with the control group,the enhanced groups have made remarkable progress in their post-test score,which indicated that visual enhancement indeed improved learners’ advantage in acquisition of target form.On the other hand,the degree of acquisition was closely related to their level of noticing.Learners’ noticing of the grammatical characteristics or deep understanding of the target form will affect their acquisition performance.That is to say,the more attention resources learners allocate,the greater chance of acquisition learners will have.Visual enhancements are feasible for English beginners especially when they are doing meaning-centered reading tasks.However,it is necessary to increase the input intensity to make students exposed to more enhanced inputs.Learners’ noticing and acquisition of target form prove that external typographical manipulations are positive and effective to learn those linguistic structures with physical salience.In this way,English teaching should utilize this effective focus-on-form instruction to scaffold for foreign language learning.