An Empirical Research on the Noticing Function of Oral Output.docVIP

An Empirical Research on the Noticing Function of Oral Output 　　Received 8 March 2015； accepted 12 May 2015 　　Published online 26 June 2015 　　Abstract 　　Based on Swain’s Output Hypothesis， the paper reports an experimental study that investigated the noticing function of oral output and its effect on the acquisition of English past hypothetical conditional. Twenty sophomores majoring in economics participated in this study， with ten of them assigned to the experimental group and the other to the control group. The experimental group was engaged in picture description tasks， which tended to elicit their oral production. The control group was only required to do comprehension tasks （ie. picture sequencing task） with the same material. The data collected from the immediate posttest and the delayed posttest were analyzed by SPSS11.5. The results indicated that the experimental group made significant improvement in using the target form in both the immediate posttest and the delayed posttest. Moreover， in both of the posttests the experimental group performed significantly better than the control group in using the target form. These results lend support to Swain’s Output Hypothesis and have important pedagogical implications. 　　Key words： Output； Noticing； Foreign language teaching and learning 　　INTRODUCTION 　　Producing the target language （TL）， or output has long been considered an important part of language learning， yet exactly whether and how it helps with language learning are often left quite vague. Many experts （e.g. Krashen， 1982， 1985； Long， 1983） claimed that output is just a manifestation of acquired knowledge and that it does not play any active role in learning the TL except as a way of practicing already-existing knowledge for greater fluency or as the means of eliciting additional input. According to Swain， these views are quite limited. Based on years of research on immersion programs， Swain put forward the Output Hypothesis in 1985， in which