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ATTENTIONAL PROCESSING OF INPUT IN EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT CONDITIONS

An Eye-Tracking Study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2016

Bimali Indrarathne  and
Judit Kormos
Bimali Indrarathne
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
Judit Kormos*
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Judit Kormos, Lancaster University, Department of Linguistics, Lancaster, LA1 4YL, United Kingdom. E-mail: j.kormos@lancaster.ac.uk
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Abstract

In this study we examined language learners’ attentional processing of a target syntactic construction in written L2 input in different input conditions, the change in learners’ knowledge of the targeted construction in these conditions, and the relationship between the change in knowledge and attentional processing. One hundred L2 learners of English in Sri Lanka were divided into four experimental groups and control group: input flood, input enhancement, a specific instruction to pay attention to the target grammatical construction in the input, and an explicit metalinguistic explanation of the target construction. Eye tracking was used to collect data on the attentional processing of 45 participants in the sample. The eye-tracking measures of learners who received a specific instruction to pay attention to the target structure and an explicit metalinguistic explanation indicated increased attentional processing. The learners in these groups also improved their knowledge of the target structure significantly. The results suggest that increased attentional processing is needed for development in L2 grammatical knowledge and that explicit instruction to pay attention to the input and metalinguistic explanation are successful in directing learners’ attentional resources toward novel grammatical constructions in the input.

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Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , September 2017 , pp. 401 - 430
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

We are grateful for the support of the EAP scholarship of Lancaster University that partly sponsored this research project and to our participants in Sri Lanka for offering their time. We also thank the reviewers for their particularly thorough and insightful comments and suggestions. All the materials used to collect data in this project are accessible in the IRIS digital repository (https://www.iris-database.org/). Primary data underlying this study is not available due to ethical concerns.

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