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3. Methodology 7
3.1. Research Design 7
3.2. Participants 7
3.3. Materials 8
3.3.1. The Grammatical Rule of the TWs Selected 8
3.3.2. The Creation of Reading Text for Experiment 9
3.4. Implementation 10
3.4.1. Multiple-choice Recognition Pretest 10
3.4.2. Recording Time for Text Reading during Experiment 11
3.4.3. Free-recall Written Task Posttest 11
3.4.4. Fill-in-the-blanks Task Posttest 12
3.5. Pilot Test 12
3.6. Experiment Procedure 13
3.6.1. Teachers’ Instructions 14
3.6.2. Pretest 14
3.6.3. Treatment: the Reading Activity 14
3.6.4. Posttests: Free-recall Written Task and Fill-in-the-blanks Task 15
3.7. Scoring and Data Analysis 16
4. Results and Discussion 17
4.1. Noticing 17
4.2. Acquisition 19
5. Conclusion 21
References 25
Appendix A. Multiple-choice Recognition Test (sample) 30
Appendix B. Reading Material (sample of TE bold version) 30
Appendix C. Post-reading Questions 30
Appendix D. Fill-in-the-blanks (sample) 31
Differential Effects of Textual Enhancement Format on the Noticing and Acquisition of Modal Auxiliary
1. Introduction
In SLA, all scholars are in agreement that input is fundamental to language acquisition. Input provides the linguistic data that a developing linguistic system needs in order for acquisition to be possible (Wong, 2005, p. 33). However, during L2 teaching, educators also found that: Learners typically appear to ignore a vast mass of evidence and continue to operate with a system that is in contradiction with the target forms as manifest in the teacher’s instruction or written input (Sharwood Smith, 1991, 1993). An explanation is given by Schmidt (1990) that failure to benefit from input may arise from a combination of lack of noticing ability on the learner’s part and poor input characteristics such as the lack of perceptual salience or ‘noticeability’. Accordingly, Sharwood Smith hypothesizes that through improving the quality of input, the learner’s input processing for form as well as meaning will be stimulated and therefore language learning. That is, input enhancement, an operation whereby the saliency of linguistic features is augmented through, for example, textual enhancement (TE). Textual Enhancement (TE) is to modify the physical appearance of written texts using typographical cues such as bold, italic, underlining, capital, highlighting with colors, changing the size or the font of letters to enhance the perceptual saliency of target linguistic features in order to draw more learners’ attention. This enhancement is of great value in promoting the L2 learners’ noticing and further acquisition of the target forms as suggested.
“Nothing in input can become intake without noticing (Schmidt, 1990, 2001; Truscott, 1998).” This assumption has underpinned the design of my research and largely inspired my expectation for the TE results. However, in reality, whether the perceptual salience of input draws the learner’s attention has been somehow understated in the TE researches. As Leow (2003) pointed out that ‘most of the studies . . . did not methodologically measure learners’ noticing while exposed to the experimental L2 data’ (p. 2). In response to that, I devised two instruments to measure TE effects at the level of noticing. One is to record the time the learners spend on reading the experimental text, while the other is to detect the frequency of TWs used in their written free-recall production after reading. As assumed, if the learners pay more attention to the highlighted target forms, they will spend more time reading the text and accordingly produce more TWs than those who are not exposed in the TE environment. Also, the frequency of TWs used in their written free-recall production can be used as a determinant on whether their noticing is valid or not, that is, whether the extra time they spent were actually on the noticing of TWs but not anywhere else.