Comprehensible Input, Negotiation of meaning, and FonF How does noticing new linguistic, discursive, pragmatic features develop into automatized use of language (reinforced comprehension and unconscious production)? What psycholinguistic processes activated during proceduralization are most conductive for noticed form features to develop into automated ones? Variable that play part in the interlanguage development: provide evidence or reflect the use of such evidence. Socio-cultural Social roles Attitudes and values Per-locutions Non-verbal means of communication Motivation Psycholinguistic Subject matter (meaning and context) Situation, concepts Input comprehensibility Psycholinguistic processes Output Variables that constrain interlanguage development: Recycling dependent Learner variability Language features (rules) Comprehensibility of input Ok, if the input is structured according to certain linguistic parameters, then yes, I agree. But if the input is a result of a natural use of language with certain linguistic features made salient, so-called enhanced input, then it’s another story and Krashen perhaps never thought about this possibility. The same goes to the teacher 2. Structured exposure may prove effective (see VanPatten and Oikennon, 1996: Explanation vs. structured input in processing instruction. Studies in L2A, 18 (4), 495 - 510) compared with explicit rule instruction and implicit randomly ordered series of instances during training. Ellis (1993, The structural syllabus and L2A. TESOL Quarterly 27 (1), 91 - 113) used two criteria: well-formedness test and demonstration of explicit knowledge of the rules. Successful performance, according to Ellis, can be achieved with the synergy of rule rule knowledge and that gained from structured exposure (p. 28) 4, 5, 6. According to Krashen, deliberate focus on form in the classroom, whether in the input to which the learner is exposed, or in the feedback on learning provided by the teacher, will not lead to any improvement in implicit knowledge. feedback. If the learner wants to test a hypothesis she deduced and build on her own, she may opt for pre-emptive feedback initiated by her or reactive feedback in the form or recast or even a rule. Why not? 3. Information processing theory sees the human being as a complex mechanism struggling to impose organization on information derived through the senses. ‘Bottom-up’ data-driven processing permits us to attend to perceptions, organize them and then extract the meaning from them. ‘Top-down’ conceptually-driven processing enables us to obtain a rapid expectation of what is likely to occur on the basis of previous experience, and to match this against the incoming sensory data. <…..> ‘New’ information is thus derived as a result of expectations produced by topdown processing eventually merging with the data derived from bottom-up processes. (59). If we could trace patterns in NS – NNS interaction while performing on a communicative or learning task and negotiating the meaning, and focusing on Form, we could be better off at making decisions regarding the nature of supplementary up FonF activities for learners to facilitate their autonomous information processing Complexity of output 2. According to Reber (1989, 1993), when the stimulus domain is simple, and learner attention is focusd on relevant aspects of the structures to be learned, then explicit conscious rule search and conscious application of rules following instruction can be more effective than implicit learning. (p. 26) 2. Prototypical rules, according to DeKeyser, R. 1995 (Learning L2 grammar rules: An experiment with a miniature linguistic system. Studies in L2A, 17(3), 379 - 410) are harder than categorical rules in the sense that they are probabilistic, and impossible to reduce to economical rule statements that apply without exception to the morphological forms concerned. Learning conditions: subjects of Implicit-inductive condition (I-I) received no instruction on rules on morphology simply viewed the sentence-picture pairs, whereas subjects in the in the explicit-duductive condition (E-D) were additionally instructed in the rules for 5-minute periods before the start of the 2nd, 3rd, and 11th training sessions. Following training, the subjects of the two groups were tested to produce written sentences describing both old and new pictures. No significant difference was found between the performance of the 2 groups in describing old pictures and applying categorical rules. However, E-D group proved significantly more successful than I-I (55% to 33%) in generalizing instruction on categorical rules to the production of novel sentences describing new pictures. The implications may be that I-I learning on categorical rules was more itemdependent and memory-based than the E-D learning. In contrast, there was no difference between the condition in production of prototypically determined morphemes on sentences describing old and new pics, although the I-I learners appeared to be more sensetive to the probabilistic nature of those rules. (pp. 28 - 29). 2. Other dimensions of rule complexity have been suggested that may interact in similar ways with learning conditions: learnability, markedness of structures described by rules, the interactions of L2 rules and L1 knowledge, the interactions of structural complexity and the transparancy (or lack thereof) of pedagogical explanations. (p. 29) FonF Competition for attention resources. Attention pool is limited or there’s no real competition for attention resources between meaning and form. Needs to be verified. 3. Since our attention is limited, we find interpretation difficult when processing demands exceed our capacity. It is important, therefore, that we build up a series of relatively automatic processes requiring very little of our attention, so that we can release our energy for the concerns which require more deliberate bottom-up processing. (60). Abstractness of meaning 2. Explicit learning may be better for the simpler categorical rules. However, in contrast to Krashen and Reber, Implicit learning was not superior to explicit learning on the complex prototypical rules. (p. 29). 3. Instead of being based on structural concerns, grading for these progressivists is to be achieved through the sort of sensitive raising and lowering of the rhetorical level of talk and of text that native speaker interlocutors manifest when interacting with learners, or that mothers and caretakers show when talking to children. (59) Negotiation of meaning 1. I would like to suggest that negotiation, and especially negotiation work that triggers interactional adjustments by the NS or more competent interlocutors, facilitates acquisition because it connects input, internal learner capacities, particularly selective attention, and output in productive ways. (pp. 451-452) 2. The FonF approach is partly motivated by so-called Interaction Hypothesis which holds that SLA is a process explicable by neither a purely linguistic nativist nor a purely environmentalist theory. According to this hypothesis, a crucial site for language development is interaction between learners and other speakers, especially, but not only, between learners and more proficient speakers, and between learners and certain types of written texts, especially elaborated ones. Particularely important is the negotiation for meaning that can occure more or less predictably in certain interactions, for example, according to the kinds of tasks in which speakers are engaged and the prevailing task conditions. (22) 3. Where tasks encountered present novel problems with little relationship to existing schemata and with few contextual clues, effective bottom-up processing become very important. Where tasks present familiar problems, top-down processing may provide rapid solutions. (60).