ABSTRACT
Drawing on Smith's (1991, 1993) proposal on input enhancement and Schmidt's (1995) noticing hypothesis, this 14-week experimental study aims to investigate whether or not Bangladeshi tertiary learners' noticing, intake, and acquisition of form to function mappings can benefit from the multiple exposure to textually enhanced input which can facilitate learner's acquisition of forms on having background knowledge about those items (Lee, 2007; White, 1998). Though these learners have 12 years pre-exposure to English, they still cannot accurately use the forms which are absent in their first language. Therefore, one such form, the subject–verb agreement in the third person present simple tense, was targeted in this study. A pre-test and two post-tests were included in the research design. A total of 100 Bangladeshi tertiary learners were assigned to three groups: enhanced, non-enhanced, and control. Four noticing questions, a reading comprehension task, two grammar tasks, a certainty judgement test, a metalinguistic awareness task, and a questionnaire were used to elicit data. The participants were exposed to enhanced and non-enhanced versions of texts. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data revealed that even after noticing textually enhanced targeted forms, the learners might not be able to intake or acquire the targeted items.
