Consciousness, noticing and restructuring

Consciousness, noticing and restructuring

1. Krashen: "Learning" --> Result of a conscious process. "Acquisition"--> The result of a subconscious one.

2. *Explicit knowledge. "Knowledge of rules and items that exist in an analysed form so that learners are able to report what they know". (Ellis 1994: 702) *Implicit knowledge. "Knowledge that is intuitive and tacit. It cannot be directly reported".

3. Types of consciousness. Schmidt. *Awarness. Includes 3 degrees of awarness, but the idea is of knowing something is there, and paying more or less atenttion to it. *Intention. Refers to the volitional aspects and refers to consciousness which is delibertately focused on something. *Consciousness as knwoledge is that the ecplicit /implicit division is best understood as a continuum rather than as two separate categories.

4. Salience. Learners cannot be forced to notice features of language they are not ready add to their developong IL. (Bastone 1994: 57).

   • *Input enhancement. (Sharwood Smith 1991). This involves drawing the learners attention to features of the text which have been made silent.
   • Instruction. Schmidt and Frota 1986: 276). "Instruction was percieved by R to make a great deal of difference".
   • How learners can be provided with opportunities for noticing in the classrom and the importance of task design in facilitating this?

5. Limited capacity processing. Learners do not necessarily produce what they have practiced.

   • Van Patten (1990: 288) asks if learners can simultaneously process data caonsiously for meaning and fomr. He suggests he answer is NO.
     • 3 hypotheses: A) That a task involving attention to "non- communicative gramaticomorphological forms" would adversely affect comprehension. b) That attention to important lexical items would not adversely affect comprehension. C) That advance learners would be better able to direct attention to form given their supperior comprehension skills.

6. Noticing the gap. How corrective feedback could be made optimumly salient and useful for learners?

7. Implications for the classroom.

   • Conditions: *The item to be noticed hould be significant for the learner. *It should be salient *Is should be frequent * It should require attention to processing of form. *It should not require simultaneous attention to processing of meaning. *There should be time to notice the item.

8. Reformulation and reconstruction. Thornuby (1997). Reformulation and reconstruction activities can promote noticing.

   • Thornury refers to Curan´s Community Language Learning as a methodology which is based on the notion of reformulation (teacher reformulates when necessary).
   • Thornbury considers the dictogloss as one example of a reconstruction acftivity. (Students listen and make notes as the teacher reads a text aloud a number of times. These notes are then used to reconstruct the original text and the students´version is compared with the teacher´s version).
     • This permits to notice the gap.
   • Retructuring. Ellis (1997: 143). "Process by which learners reorganize their interlangauge in the light of the new evidence about the target languge".

9. Conclusion. Conscious awareness is essential to drive interlanguage forward.