and thousands of bits of information simultaneously. Automatic processing is generally characterized as fast, relatively unstoppable, independent of the amount of information being processed, effortless, and unconscious. To ex-tend the tennis example, automatic processing in tennis involves simultane-ous attention to one’s location on the court, your opponent’s location, your and your opponent’s abilities, strategies for winning the point, decisions about using forehand or backhand, and the list goes on.
Both ends of this continuum of processing can occur with either ‘focal’ or
‘peripheral’ attention to the task at hand, that is, focusing attention either centrally or simply on the periphery. It is easy to fall into the temptation of thinking of focal attention as ‘conscious’ attention, but such a pitfall must be avoided. Both focal and peripheral attention to some task may be quite con-scious. When you are driving a car, for example, your focal attention may center on cars directly in front of you as you move forward; but your periph-eral attention to cars beside you and behind you, to potential hazards, and of course to the other thoughts running through your mind, is all very much within your conscious awareness.
While many controlled processes are focal, some, like child first language learning or the learning of skills without any instruction, can be peripheral.
Similarly, many automatic processes are peripheral, but some can be focal, as in the case of an accomplished pianist performing in a concert or an expe-rienced driver paying particular attention to the road on a foggy night. It is very important to note that in virtually every act of performing something, focal and peripheral attention actually occur simultaneously, and the ques-tion is: What, specifically, occupies a person’s focal and peripheral atten-tion? So, for example, a very young child who says to a parent *‘Nobody don’t like me’ is undoubtedly focally attending to conveying emotion, men-tal anguish, or loneliness, and peripherally attending to words and mor-phemes that underlie the central meaning. Other factors that garner attention somewhere in between centrally focal and extremely peripheral may be read-ing the parent’s facial features, mental recall of an uncomfortable incident of rejection, awareness of a sibling overhearing the communication, and even such peripheral nonlinguistic, noncognitive factors as the temperature in the room at the moment, a light in the background, the smell of dinner cooking, or the warmth of the parent’s arms enfolding the child. All of these percep-tions, from highly focal to very peripheral, are within the awareness of the child. McLaughlin noted that the literature in experimental psychology indi-cates that there is no long-term learning (of new material) without aware-ness. A cognitive perspective of SLA entirely obviates the need to distin-guish conscious and subconscious processing.
When applied to SLA, this approach can be summarized as follows: Learn-ers first resort to controlled processing in the second language. This con-trolled processing involves the temporary activation of a selection of
infor-Attention-Processing Model 29 mation nodes in the memory, in a new configuration. Such processing re-quires a lot of attentional control on the part of the subject, and is con-strained by the limitations of the SHORT-TERM MEMORY. For example, a be-ginner learner wanting to greet someone in the second language might acti-vate the following words: good morning how are you? Initially, these words have to be put together in a piecemeal fashion, one at a time (assuming they have not been memorized as an unanalyzed chunk).
Through repeated activation, sequences first produced by controlled pro-cessing become automatic. Automatized sequences are stored as units in the
LONG-TERM MEMORY, which means that they can be made available very rap-idly whenever the situation requires it, with minimal attentional control on the part of the subject. As a result, automatic processes can work in parallel, activating clusters of complex cognitive skills simultaneously. So, in the above example, once a learner has activated the sequence good morning how are you? a large number of times, it becomes automatic, that is, it does not require attentional control. However, once acquired, such automatized skills are difficult to delete or modify.
‘Learning’ in this view is seen as the movement from controlled to automatic processing via PRACTICE (repeated activation). When this shift occurs, con-trolled processes are freed to deal with higher levels of processing (i.e., the integration of more complex skill clusters), thus explaining the incremental (step by step) nature of learning. It is necessary for simple sub-skills and routines to become automatic before more complex ones can be tackled.
Once a learner has automatized good morning how are you?, he is free to deal with the learning of more complex language, as the short-term memory is not taken up by the production of this particular string.
This continuing movement from controlled to automatic processing results in a constant RESTRUCTURING of the linguistic system of the second language learner. This phenomenon may account for some of the VARIABILITY charac-teristic of learner language. Restructuring destabilizes some structures in the
INTERLANGUAGE, which seemed to have been previously acquired, and hence leads to the temporary reappearance of second language errors. Restructur-ing is also the result of exemplar-based representations becomRestructur-ing rule-based (see DUAL-MODE SYSTEM). Second language learners often start by memoriz-ing unanalyzed chunks of language, which will later be analyzed and give rise to productive rules. For example, a learner might first memorize a ques-tion as an unanalyzed chunk, for example have you got a pet?, without hav-ing a productive rule for interrogatives, involvhav-ing inversion. When this learner starts generating interrogatives that are not rote-learned chunks, he might produce an alternative, uninverted form, such has you have pet?
This account is especially convincing in its explanation of the vexed issue of
FOSSILIZATION, which is so well documented in second language acquisition studies. Fossilization in this model would arise as a result of a controlled
30 attitude
process becoming automatic prematurely, before it is native-like. As we have seen, automatic processes are difficult to modify as they are outside the attentional control of the subject. Thus, they are likely to remain in the learn-er’s interlanguage, giving rise to a stable but erroneous construction. How-ever, this general idea does not explain why some structures seem much more likely to fossilize than others.
see also PROCESSABILITY THEORY, PERCEPTUAL SALIENCY APPROACH, ADAP-TIVE CONTROL OF THOUGHT MODEL
Brown 2007; Ellis 2008; Hulstijn 1990; McLaughlin 1987, 1990a, 1990b; McLaughlin et al. 1983; McLeod & McLaughlin 1986; Mithcell & Myles 2004; Segalowitz 2003
attitude
a set of personal feelings, opinions, or biases about races, cultures, ethnic groups, classes of people, and languages. Attitudes, like all aspects of the development of cognition and affect in human beings, develop early in childhood and are the result of parents’ and peers’ attitudes, of contact with people who are different in any number of ways, and of interacting affective factors in the human experience. These attitudes form a part of one’s percep-tion of self, of others, and of the culture in which one is living.
It seems clear that second language learners benefit from positive attitudes and that negative attitudes may lead to decreased motivation and, in all like-lihood, because of decreased input and interaction, to unsuccessful attain-ment of proficiency. Yet the teacher needs to be aware that everyone has both positive and negative attitudes. The negative attitudes can be changed, often by exposure to reality—e.g., by encounters with actual persons from other cultures. Negative attitudes usually emerge from one’s indirect expo-sure to a culture or group through television, movies, news media, books, and other sources that may be less than reliable. Teachers can aid in dispel-ling what are often myths about other cultures, and replace those myths with an accurate understanding of the other culture as one that is different from one’s own, yet to be respected and valued. Learners can thus move through the hierarchy of affectivity through awareness and responding, to valuing, and finally to an organized and systematic understanding and appreciation of the foreign culture.
Brown 2007 Attribution Theory
a theory which focuses on how people explain the causes of their own suc-cesses and failures. Attribution theory is described in terms of four explana-tions for success and/or failure in achieving a personal objective: ability, ef-fort, perceived difficulty of a task, and luck. Two of those four factors are internal to the learner: ability and effort; and two are attributable to external circumstances outside of the learner: task difficulty and luck. Learners tend to explain, that is, to attribute, their success on a task on these four
dimen-attrition 31 sions. Depending on the individual, a number of causal determinants might be cited. Thus, failure to get a high grade on a final exam in a language class might for some be judged to be a consequence of their poor ability or effort, and by others to difficulty of exam, and perhaps others to just plain old bad luck.
This is where self-efficacy (i.e., belief in one’s own capabilities to success-fully perform an activity) comes in. If a learner feels he is capable of carry-ing out a given task, in other words, a high sense of self-efficacy, an appro-priate degree of effort may be devoted to achieving success. Falling short of one’s personal goals may then be attributable to not enough effort expended, but rarely, in the case of students with high self-efficacy, would an excuse be made attributing the bad performance to something like bad luck. Converse-ly, a learner with low self-efficacy may quite easily attribute failure to exter-nal factors, a relatively unhealthy psychological attitude to bring to any task.
Students with low self-efficacy might also attribute failure to an initial lack of ability. Both of the latter attributions can create a self-fulfilling sense of failure at the outset.
see also SELF-ESTEEM, INHIBITION, ANXIETY, RISK TAKING, WILLINGNESS TO COMMUNICATE, EMPATHY, MOTIVATION
Brown 2007 attrition
the loss or forgetting of language skills. Language attrition refers to the gradual forgetting of a first or second language. It may be distinguished from the term ‘language shift’, where the focus is on groups of speakers, and from
‘language loss’, a term applied to the decline of linguistic skills in individu-als or speech communities. A common typology for research in attrition lists four categories of natural language attrition (rather than pathological condi-tions such as APHASIA):
1) attrition of first language skills (L1) in an L1 environment (e.g., ageing, dialectal loss);
2) attrition of L1 skills in an L2 environment (e.g., fading L1 in migrant populations);
3) attrition of L2 in an L1 environment (e.g., decline in school-learned L2) or decline in L2 following return to home country (e.g., returning expat-riate workers or their children); and
4) attrition of L2 skills in an L2 environment (e.g., loss of L2 skills when ageing).
Language attrition is recognized as a normal part of changes in language proficiency over time, as distinct from changes caused by accident or dis-ease. The degree and rate of language attrition may be a ected by any or all