CONSCIOUSNESS, NOTICING AND RESTRUCTURING

CONSCIOUSNESS, NOTICING AND RESTRUCTURING

1. SLA

   • We consider the role of consciousness in language learniong and pay particular attention to noticing, reformulation and reconstruccion
   • We will consider restructuring of IL as a possible outcome of paying conscious attention to form
   • PRESENTATION, PRACTICE, PRODUCTION (PPP)
     • Has been definde as an approach to grammar lessons based on the idea of giving small items of language to students, providing them with opportunities to use it in controlled ways and finally integrating it with other known language in order to communicate
       • Two terms
         • INPUT: Mean the language that is available to the student , either in the presentation or beyond it
         • INTAKE: Part of the input that the learner notices
         • NOTICING 1) Conscious awareness of salient features in the input. 2) Noticing the gap, where learners become aware of differences between their own linguistic output and what is present in input.
           • CONSCIOUSNESS
             • Schmit (1990) Consciousness is problematic in SLA as it raises the issue of explicit and implicit knowledge, an area about which there is considerable disagreement
               • EXPLICIT KNOWLEDGE: Has been defined as knowledge of rules and items that exist in an analysed form so that the learners are able to report what they know
               • IMPLICIT KNOWLEDGE : Is knowledge that is intuitive and tacit. It cannot be directly reported
             • Krashen´s Monitor Theory: Distinguishes between learning and acquisition
               • SECOND lANGUAGE ACQUISITION: Learning is the result of a conscious process
               • ACQUISITION: It is the result of a subconscious one
             • Bialystok¨s Model of Second Language: Two differente types of knowledge have access to and affect each other, a grammatical structure for which a student has explicit knowledg can become implicit knowledge through practice
             • Schmit : Suggests that the role of consciousness has been underestimated
             • TYPES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
               • Schmidt identifies three types of consciousness (1990)
                 • AWARENESS: Includes three degrees of awareness, but the idea is of knowing something is there (in language learning terms, let us say, the past tense and paying more or less atention to it.
                 • INTENTION: Refers to the volitional aspect and refers to consciousness wich is deliberately focused on something
                 • Knowledge is that the explicit/implicit division is best understood as a continuum rather than as two separate categories
                 • SILIENCE
                   • It is the notion of input enhancement . This involve drawing the learner´s attention to features of the text which have been made salient. In other words, can be internally triggered when the learner´s own mechanisms are ready to acquire the new structure. Another way of providing enhanced input is through instruction
     • LIMITED CAPACITY PROCESSING
       • One of the problems with the PPP model of teaching is that learners do not necessarily produce wht they have practised
         • Sharwood Smith (1991) suggests the term MODULAR as a metaphor for understanding the human mind´s multifacetedness
         • Van Patten set out to prove three hypotheses: 1) that a task involving attention to non-communicative grammatico-morphological forms would adversely affect comprenhension 2) That attention to important lexical items would not adversely affect comprehnesion 3)That advance learners would be better able to direct attention to form given their superior comprehension skills
         • Skehan (1996)Capaity-robbing attend to some things at the expense of others. This has implications for the tasks teachers set- we need to remember to cater for both types of processing
         • Schmidt and Frota (1986) One of the advantages of a conscious notice-the gap principle is that it provides a way to include a role for correction
         • White (1986) The benefits of correction as a short cut to helping students notice the gap and thereby rigger restructuring of their Il; however , the learners may still fail to make use of corrective feedback
         • IMPLICATIONS FOR THE CLASSROOM
           • 1) The item to be noticed should be significant for the learner 2) It should be salient 3) It should be frequent 4) It should require attention to processing of form 4)It should not require simultaneous attention to processing of meaning 5) There should be time to notice the item
             • Schmidt (1990) The tasks we set can help make elements of the input significant to the learner
             • Batstone (1994) Salience can be ensure in a number of ways
             • Tomasello and Herron (1988) The garden path technique, where learners are encouraged to make a hypothesis and then overgeneralise on the basis of this until they produce an unacceptable form.
               • RESTRUCTURING
                 • Ellis (1997) Describes it as the process by which learners reorganize their interlanguage in the light of new evidence about the target language
                 • McLaughlin (1990) The concept restructuring derives from Piaget´s view that cognitive development is an outcome of underlying structural changes in the cognitive system, and is characterized by discontinuous, or qualitative, change as the child moves from stages to stage in development. Each new stage constitutes a new internal organization and not merely the addition of new structural elementss
             • Thornbury (1997) Noticing requires the marshalling of attentional resources, which, in turn, requires time and the absence of distractions.
               • Reformulation and Reconstruction
                 • These activities can promote noticing.
                   • REFORMULATION:The student´s written work can be reformulated by the teacher so thay it approximates as closely as possible to a putative target language model. Ii is then available for comparison with the student´s own draft
                   • In the reconstruction the text to be reconstructed originates in the teacher. These notes are then used to reconstruct the original text and the students´version is comñpared with the teacher´s version.