A Study on the Different Levels of “Attention” in the Processing of English Subjunctive Mood by Chinese Learners

“Attention” is a very vital cognitive mechanism. Cognitive psychology considers “attention” as the focus of mental activity and consciousness on an object. People engage their senses and memory to actively process the object in front of them. Theories of second language acquisition suggest that a large amount of input is the basis for language acquisition. At the same time, what is actively noticed by the learner can be effectively internalized. Thus, “attention” is also a non-linguistic factor that plays a significant role in language acquisition. The subjunctive mood is a major challenge in the teaching of English grammar. Generally speaking, the verbs in a sentence are used to distinguish between subjunctive and declarative sentences. In this paper, experimental utterances were written based on previous research by using verbs that are easy to cause ambiguity and confusion, and then set up the reinforced and non-reinforced attention conditions with different levels of “attention” to investigate whether there are different results and effects on subjects’ comprehension of sentences under different levels of “attention” conditions. Under the different levels of “attention”, the subjects were examined to see whether there were different results in comprehension of the sentences and the impact of the different levels of “attention”. It was found that subjects in the reinforced “attention” condition comprehended sentences better, answered questions faster, and answered questions more correctly than subjects in the non-reinforced condition. This study also shed some light on English second language grammar teaching.