October 27th, 2009
I gave a talk today at Oxford University. You can find the abstract below as well as the presentation. Try using ‘full screen’ mode to best view the presentation.
The effects of Enhanced input on intake and acquisition of implicit and explicit knowledge
The importance of ample input for second language acquisition is uncontroversial. At the same time, evidence exists (for example from studies in immersion settings) to show that even with massive exposure certain aspects of the language develop slowly or not at all. This appears to apply especially to formal features that are semantically redundant and/or that are difficult to notice. It appears that such aspects require some form of instructional intervention, although it remains unclear what type of intervention is most effective. One instructional possibility is ‘input enhancement’. This presentation reports a study that investigated the effect of two different types of input enhancement (input enrichment and input enrichment + noticing instruction) on both the intake and acquisition of a difficult grammatical structure (negative adverbs). The effect of the instruction was measured in terms of both implicit and explicit L2 knowledge. The study showed that enhanced input in the form of enriched input resulted in intake and assisted the acquisition of implicit knowledge. It showed that asking students to pay attention to the target structure conferred no additional advantage for either intake or acquisition.
Tags: input, intake, noticing, sla, tasks, tblt
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October 22nd, 2008
Research into brain activity may help make language learning processes ‘observable’ and offers a fascinating line of research. In preparing for an article I’m writing I re-read some interesting works in the area of cognitive psychology and have been pondering how this could help detect intake processes (which were are a focus of my research). Buckner (2000) neatly sums it up:
Neuroimaging data suggest a pattern relating localized brain activity and memory encoding. Several neuroscientific hypotheses have proposed that certain regions within the frontal cortex participate in the short term maintenance and manipulation of information over brief periods of time, as would be required during many kinds of information processing tasks. Deep processing tasks and intentional tasks make use of such processing, while shallow processing tasks do not (Buckner & Tulving 1995).’ (p. 285)
Buckner relates this to the formation of memory traces: ‘one speculation would be that the critical cascade that drives episodic human memory formation occurs when frontal activity provides a source of information (input) to medial temporal lobes and functions to bind together the outcomes of information proccessing from frontal and other cortical regions to form lasting, recollectable memory traces’ (p. 285). The same could apply to language learning where frontal processing provides input to the rest of the developing system. This is an interesting, but as of yet little explored avenue for research into the topic of intake and one that I hope to pursue more.
Tags: cognitive psychology, intake, memory, MRI, neuro-imaging
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August 17th, 2008
I recently had an article published in the Korean Journal of Applied Linguistics. The title is ‘The effects of implicit and explicit instructions on acquisition of two English grammatical structures’. You can read the article here.
Tags: intake, noticing
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