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.