earticle

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In my study, the effectiveness of textual enhancement was examined to investigate how it can be used to help L2 learners better notice and learn particular L2 grammatical features (i.e., English determiners). Textual enhancement is a form of input enhancement, and an implicit and unobtrusive means of drawing the learners’ attention to form contained in the written input (Doughty & Williams, 1998). My study compared the performance of the experimental and control groups of university students in Korea for 4 weeks. For textual enhancement, students were required to read a textually manipulated passage in which all core-determiners and following nouns in the passages were highlighted and each of the core-determiners was underlined. The results of my study showed that textual enhancement alone was not a significant factor to explain learners’ noticing of determiners. This is because, during reading, students often attend to the content of passages for comprehension rather than also attending to form, and this tendency was also consistent during input enhancement. On the other hand, the results showed, when metaawareness was considered a variable, that the experimental group with meta-awareness gained significantly more in the posttest than the other two. In conclusion, my study suggests that meta-awareness is necessary for noticing targeted forms during input sessions.