be referring to the same concept. For example, you will see later a conf lation between “(level of) attention” and “type of noticing” with “(level of) process-ing,” as in “attentional levels,” “focused attention,” and “quality of noticprocess-ing,”
in addition to, for example, references to “simultaneous attention to form and meaning” and “blocked attention.” It appears that the term “attention” subsumes
“noticing” and further “processing” of the targeted items in the input. However, one can pay attention to an item in the input, but this does not always translate to it being noticed , that is, attended and processed with a low level of awareness a la Schmidt (2001), or even further processed (elaboration, activation of prior knowledge, form-meaning connection, etc.). At this point, simply keep in mind that we need to view the process of attention as having several types or phases dependent upon whether it is peripheral, selective, or focal. These types or phases will be distinguished in Chapter 12 .
Empirical Research on Attention/Noticing in SLA
SLA research is quite rich in the number of strands seeking to find ways to pro-mote L2 development, and studies usually claim to conduct these studies from a classroom-based perspective with the purpose of improving our students’ L2 development. The techniques devised to promote intake and L2 learning by drawing, directly or indirectly, learners’ attention to formal aspects of the L2 (with the implicit hope that they do process a bit deeper what is attended) date back several decades ago to the early 90s when researchers became more aware (levels of awareness) of the central role that the construct of attention plays in SLA. Any guess as to the theoretical source of this “new” interest in atten-tion ( Chapter 3 )? These techniques included aural and written simplificaatten-tion of texts (e.g., Leow, 1993, 1995; Wong, 2001) as well as a series of form-focusing or consciousness/awareness-raising tasks (e.g., Fotos, 1994; Leow, 1997a). In addition, some researchers have investigated whether attention to form (mainly grammatical) may also be encouraged through a variety of input-enhancement and focus-on-form (FonF) techniques (e.g., Doughty, 1991; Lyddon, 2011), input f lood or an increase in the frequency of the target form (e.g., J. White, 1998;
Williams & Evans, 1998), processing instruction (e.g., Morgan-Short & Wood Bowden, 2006; VanPatten & Cadierno, 1993), learning or training conditions (e.g., Morgan-Short, Sanz, Steinhauer, & Ullman, 2010; Robinson, 1996), the provi-sion of feedback in the oral/aural (e.g., Leeman, 2003; Lyster & Saito, 2010) or written (e.g., Bitchener & Knoch, 2010; Storch & Wigglesworth, 2010) mode, accompanied or not by explicit rule presentation (e.g., Rosa & Leow, 2004a), face-to-face or computerized (e.g., Hsieh, Moreno, & Leow, 2015; Sanz &
Morgan-Short, 2004), and so on.
Attention/noticing has been measured by a variety of instruments in these studies that include off line questionnaires (e.g., Alanen, 1995), online uptake charts (Mackey, McDonough, Fujii, & Tatsumi, 2001), learning diaries (e.g.,
Schmidt & Frota, 1986), online verbal reports (e.g., Leow, 2001a), off line verbal reports such as stimulated recall protocols (e.g., Egi, 2008), and eye-tracking (e.g., Smith, 2012). In addition, in some studies participants were prompted to take notes while reading an L2 text (Izumi, 2002), to underline, circle, or check targeted linguistic structures in written text (Greenslade, Bouden, & Sanz, 1999), or to make a check mark every time a targeted item was heard (VanPatten, 1990).
Quite a large range of linguistic items has also been empirically investigated, and these include Spanish imperatives (e.g., Leow, 1997b), imperfect and preterit forms (e.g., Overstreet, 1998), present perfect forms (e.g., Leow, Egi, Nuevo, &
Tsai, 2003), relative pronouns (e.g., Shook, 1994), past conditional (Rosa & Leow, 2004a), Finnish locative suffixes (e.g., Alanen, 1995), English possessive deter-miners (e.g., J. White, 1998), relative clauses (Izumi, 2002), French past par-ticiple agreement (e.g., Wong, 2003), and so on. Different levels of language experience have also been explored, ranging from beginning learners of an L2 (e.g., Alanen, 1995) to intermediate (e.g., Bowles, 2003) to advanced levels (e.g., Rosa & Leow, 2004b). Amount of exposure is also differential, ranging from less than an hour (e.g., Leow, 1997a) to over several days (e.g., J. White, 1998). Over-all, the findings of these studies provide strong support for the role of attention and/or noticing in L2 development. However, the research designs of many of these studies did not methodologically tease out the specific role attention played during exposure to incoming L2 data.
Before we take a look at some of the popular strands of research and their respective theoretical underpinnings, we need to first discuss the early atten-tional studies addressing directly the assumed metaphor of adult learners as lim-ited capacity processors of information.
SLA Studies Under the Metaphor of Adult Learners as Limited Capacity Processors of Information
As I mentioned above, we (including yours truly as a young scholar many decades ago) like to follow non-SLA fields to provide a theoretical foundation for our empirical studies. Not surprisingly, then, drawing from the attentional theories postulated in cognitive psychology ( Chapter 3 ), the early 90s witnessed the first SLA studies (Leow, 1993, 1995; Shook, 1994; VanPatten, 1990) that have been conducted under the metaphor of adult L2 learners as limited capacity processors of incoming information.
VanPatten investigated the attentional capacity of adult L2 learners in the aural mode. He hypothesized that attending to both form and meaning simultane-ously would result in a cognitive overload. Participants were exposed to Spanish aural input in one of four conditions: Condition 1 required participants to listen for meaning only, condition 2 required them to listen to the word “ inflación ” (“inf lation”) only, condition 3 required them to listen to the definite article “ la ,”
while condition 4 required the participants to listen to the third-person plural
morpheme - n . Attention was operationalized by asking participants to mark on a sheet of paper every instance targeted linguistic forms were noticed in the input. VanPatten found an overall decrease of comprehension when participants appeared to have attended to la and - n (argued to be of less communicative value) when compared to attention paid to inflación (argued to be of more com-municative value). He also found superior performance at the advanced level when compared to the less advanced level, prompting him to postulate that
“only when input is easily understood can learners attend to form as part of the intake process” (VanPatten, 1990: 296). In other words, there may be a tendency at the early stages of language learning to process only for meaning due to the constraints of attentional resources to accommodate both form and meaning simultaneously.
These findings appeared to have led to VanPatten’s (1996, 2004, 2007) pos-tulation of his first and major input processing principle, namely, the Primacy of Content Word Principle (cf. Chapter 5 ) that claims that learners are driven to process or make form-meaning connections of content words (e.g., lexical items such as words) in the input before non-content words such as the , is , and so on. Inspired by the notion of limited capacity or inability to divide one’s attention to incoming information in the L2, at least five published empirical studies specifically investigated the issue of simultaneous attention to (read: pro-cessing of ) form and meaning in the SLA literature by conceptually or partially replicating VanPatten’s original study (Greenslade et al., 1999; Wong, 2001) or by extending the research design to address some methodological issues (Han &
Peverly, 2007; Leow, Hsieh, & Moreno, 2008; Morgan-Short, Heil, Botero-Moriarty, & Ebert, 2012). Whereas Greenslade et al.’s replication study changed the input mode from aural to written, Wong conducted a partial replication of both VanPatten (1990) and Greenslade et al. (1999). Her research design differed from both VanPatten’s and Greenslade et al.’s in that it directly compared the aural and written modes within the same participant pool and sought to explore whether similar results would hold across different modalities. In addition, given that her participants were (French) students learning English as a foreign language, VanPatten’s experimental text was translated into English, resulting in the loss of the morpheme - n as one of the targeted forms. Greenslade et al.’s (1999) results paralleled those found in VanPatten’s (1990) study with one appar-ently major difference: No significant difference in comprehension was found between the lexical item inflación and verbal morpheme - n groups, arguably the two experimental groups representing the ends of a form continuum in this study in terms of saliency of item. In spite of this contradictory finding, Greenslade et al. concluded that during the early stages of L2 acquisition, pro-cessing for meaning and form in the written mode also competes for learners’
limited attentional resources.
In the aural mode, Wong (2001) reported, as VanPatten (1990) did, that partici-pants listening to content only comprehended significantly more than participartici-pants
listening to the definite article the , but performed statistically similar to the inflation group. However, differing from VanPatten, no significant difference in comprehen-sion was found between the inflation and the definite article the groups. In the written mode Wong reported, as Greenslade et al. (1999) did, that there was no significant difference in comprehension between the read-for-content-only group and the inflation group. However, her findings differed in the other two conditions identical in the two written studies: No differences in comprehension were found between the control and the definite article the groups and between the inflation and the definite article the groups. Overall, only the control and inflation groups’ statistically similar performances supported the previous studies. Wong (2001) concluded that her findings suggest that “learners’ limited attentional capacity is not constrained in the same way during input processing in the aural and written modes” (p. 358; cf.
Leow, 1995).
Leow et al. (2008) continued this strand of inquiry in the written mode, making adjustments in the research design to address some methodological issues with the previous studies. The changes included (a) the collection of online ver-bal reports as a means of determining the baseline of the research design, that is, whether participants did pay attention to both form and meaning as instructed;
(b) the use of a ten-item written multiple choice test as the measure of com-prehension instead of the free recall method; (c) the use of sol , meaning ‘sun,’
instead of inflación as the lexical item to control for saliency differences between the lexical and grammatical items; (d) the inclusion of a new grammatical form, lo, a direct object clitic pronoun meaning “him” or “it,” that was claimed to have a higher communicative value than the definite article and the verbal mor-pheme; and (e) a more even distribution of the targeted forms throughout a new reading passage that had been modified from an authentic Spanish article. Like previous studies, participants in the experimental groups were included in the analysis if they had circled at least 60% of the occurrences of their particular target form. Similar to the results for the written passage in Wong (2001), Leow et al. (2008) found no differences in the level of comprehension between the experimental and control conditions and suggested one plausible explanation for the results based on evidence gleaned from the think aloud protocols, namely that all experimental groups evidenced a low level of processing. A conceptual replication of Leow et al. (Morgan-Short et al., 2012) provided empirical support for the external validity of the original study by reporting similar findings with a larger number of participants (p. 361).
Finally, Han and Peverly (2007), arguing that studies investigating learners’
capacity to simultaneously process form and meaning have “emanated almost exclusively from studies of learners who had some knowledge of the target lan-guage” (p. 18), addressed this issue with naïve learners’ exposed to Norwegian, a language with which none “had any prior experience” (p. 25). The participants were randomly divided into a Sequential (SQ) and a Simultaneous (SM) group and were then exposed to a written text in Norwegian taken from a popular
Norwegian textbook. They reported that directing attention to either form or meaning did not have a significant effect on processing for meaning by naïve learners.
Under the same limited capacity metaphor, Leow (1993, 1995) addressed the issue of simplification on learners’ intake in both written and aural modes.
Leow hypothesized that textual simplification of input, resulting in a more sta-tistically comprehensible text, should reduce the processing demands of adult L2 learners, thereby facilitating their intake of the linguistic items under study.
In both the written (Leow, 1993) and aural (Leow, 1995) modes, the results were the same: Simplification did not appear to facilitate any significant intake of the targeted forms in the input. In other words, there was no direct evidence that suggested that learners reallocated their attention to form when the pro-cessing demands to attend to meaning were significantly reduced. Attention was operationalized by learners’ performances on a post-exposure multiple-choice recognition task.
Shook (1994) investigated the effects of attentional condition on learners’
intake of two linguistic items, the present perfect and the relative pronoun ( que and quien ) contained in a written Spanish text. Participants were divided into three groups: The first was exposed to the text alone, the second was exposed to the grammatical items bolded with no instructions, and the third received a similar text like the second group together with the request to deduce a gram-matical rule for the bolded items. The premise underlying the study was that the saliency of the targeted forms in the input would draw learners’ attention to them while processing the text content. Shook found significant effects for type of attentional condition on learners’ intake of grammatical information contained in written input. Participants exposed to the enhanced texts presum-ably paid substantially more attention to the targeted forms when compared to participants not exposed to such enhanced forms in the input. Like Leow (1993, 1995) and VanPatten (1990), Shook’s results also indicated different processing for different linguistic items, where the perfect tense form was taken in more significantly than the relative form. However, he also had a mixed bag of find-ings with respect to language experience: Second-year learners performed better than first-year learners on the present perfect production task, but this finding was the opposite for the relative pronoun production task.
Summary
Overall, studies empirically addressing L2 learners’ limited attentional capacity or ability to simultaneously process both grammatical information and content in the L2 appear to indicate that while modality may play a role in performance due to cognitive constraints, current findings also appear to indicate some role of depth of processing in accounting for non-significant differences in perfor-mances between experimental conditions. The question remains whether it is
methodologically possible to separate one’s processing of grammatical informa-tion embedded in a form devoid of processing for meaning or vice versa. To this end, further studies are required to provide more substantial empirical support for this principle.
The Input or Textual Enhancement Strand
The notion of input enhancement has permeated several distinct strands of research in pedagogical second language acquisition (SLA) literature (e.g., pro-cessing instruction, consciousness-raising, input f looding, focus on form, textual enhancement, interaction). This strand of research is relatively popular, perhaps due to the fact that many researchers (and teachers) feel that enhancing the L2 input does work. Keep in mind that there are several issues (which will be enhanced later) that are very important to consider when reading the literature on input enhancement.
Theoretical Underpinning
The term “input enhancement” was first coined by Sharwood Smith (1991, 1993) to override his previous term “language consciousness-raising” (Sharwood Smith, 1981), that is, the guidance teachers provide for promoting second/foreign lan-guage (L2) learners’ self-discovery or conscious awareness of the formal features of the L2. According to Sharwood Smith, input enhancement can be defined from two perspectives: An external perspective, which is any pedagogical attempt (usu-ally by a teacher) to make more salient specific features of L2 input in an effort to draw learners’ attention to such enhanced features (raise your hand if you write on the blackboard and then underline, circle, capitalize, etc., some grammati-cal point you are trying to underscore! I still do after 40 years of teaching), and an internal perspective, that is, it is the learners’ internal mechanism that makes salient specific features in the input. The major theoretical underpinning of either perspective is, without doubt, that learners need to pay attention to specific items in the input before such information can be taken in, with the potential of being processed further into the learners’ language system. In an effort to move away from the perception of consciousness-raising as “a complete and unrelenting focus on the formal structure of the TL” (Sharwood Smith, 1981: 160), Sharwood Smith proposed that language consciousness-raising be viewed from two axes: Degrees of elaboration and explicitness leading to four basic types of manifestation of consciousness-raising based on these two axes. From this discussion, it appears that the focus of the discussion was more on product (explicit knowledge) than on process (input processing).
In 1991, Sharwood Smith appeared to view input enhancement somewhat more from an input processing perspective than a product perspective as previ-ously posited. First of all, he overrode his previous term consciousness-raising
with input enhancement, while acknowledging the discrepancy in the two terms’ assumptions regarding the input/intake dichotomy in light of an inter-nal processing (consciousness-raising) versus an exterinter-nal manipulation of the L2 input (input enhancement). In other words, while consciousness-raising assumed that learners became conscious of all the input they were exposed to, leading to some linguistic change in their mental state, input enhancement assumed that manipulated input (by the teacher) may or may not be taken in by the learners.
Think of not even paying attention to the language.
Based on language learnability (e.g., Hornstein & Lightfoot, 1981), that is, that input may be viewed from various kinds of evidence, usually referred to as being either positive or negative, Sharwood Smith cautioned that the enhanced input might or might not be further processed into the language system, that is, L2 knowledge. In other words, this may be interpreted that while enhanced input is noticed and taken in by the learner, such linguistic information may not be further processed due to the kind of evidence to which learners are exposed.
However, in this same article Sharwood Smith also began to question the role of awareness in input enhancement by drawing on notions from non-SLA fields such as “disunity of awareness” (Jackendoff, 1987), that is, the possibility of being aware of something and not aware of it, and suggested that language learn-ing be viewed also from a modular perspective (Fodor, 1983). These issues are elaborated in his 1993 article in which he followed Jackendoff’s (1987) postula-tion that no activity of the mind is conscious and that, at most, one is only aware of a succession of states. Did anyone notice (with some level of awareness) the connection between this theoretical shift and MOGUL (Truscott & Sharwood Smith, 2011)?
Empirical Studies
Studies purporting to address the benefits of input enhancement over unen-hanced input have generally followed Sharwood Smith’s (1991) definition of input enhancement as any pedagogical intervention on the part of the teacher to make targeted items in the L2 input more salient in an effort to draw their attention to these enhanced items. In other words, studies in the research strand of input enhancement are minimally premised on the role of attention, that is, learners exposed to enhanced input should pay more attention to and substan-tially process better enhanced items in the input when compared to learners not exposed to such enhancement. Several studies have attempted to address a permutation of the different exemplars of Sharwood Smith’s two axes, that is, elaboration and explicitness. According to Sharwood Smith, exemplars on the elaboration axis range from a onetime signal to indicate a learner error to repeated signals for the same type of error. Exemplars on the explicitness axis range from a facial gesture to a metalinguistically sophisticated rule explanation.
However, as I pointed out (Leow, 2009), the definition of input enhancement,