Impact of Textual Enhancement on Bangladeshi Tertiary Learner’s Noticing and Grammatical Development of Present Perfect and Past Simple Tenses

Abstract

Textual Enhancement (TE) can be distinguished as the focus on form procedure that intends to increase input saliency in any kind of texts so that learners can notice target forms in a meaning oriented context and thereby acquiring the form-function mapping of those items (Schmidt, 1995, 2001; Smith, 1991, 1993). Lee (2007) and White (1998) suggested that this implicit procedure would be able to assist the language acquisition process of those learners who have pre-knowledge regarding target forms. In spite of having long term pre-exposure to English, most of the Bangladeshi tertiary learners encounter problems in using present perfect and past simple tenses accurately. Therefore, this experimental study investigated whether or not TE could facilitate those learners’ noticing, intake and acquisition of those forms. With this aim, the study was conducted with pre-test, immediate post-test and delayed post-test research design. 100 Bangladeshi undergraduate participants were divided into enhanced, non-enhanced and control groups. Data were elicited by a note taking, a reading comprehension, two grammar and a metalinguistic awareness tasks along with four noticing questions. The findings of the study exposed that multiple exposure to TE was able to facilitate only the noticing and the intake of the targeted forms.