Attention and second language acquisition: The role of detection in the L2 acquisition of English passives

This dissertation examines the role of attention in second language acquisition. There have been many attempts to employ notions of attention in the field of second language acquisition, but most of them have failed to define the exact concept of attention and reveal its role in second language acquisition. Tomlin and Villa (1994) suggest fine-grained conceptions of attention, which are based on literature in cognitive psychology and divide attention into alertness, orientation, and detection. They introduce a cognitive model of second language acquisition which aims to explain how attention, specifically detection, operates in the process of second language acquisition. This dissertation tries to extend and develop the cognitive model by investigating the role of detection in the acquisition of second language grammar.; The first experiment reveals the developmental pattern of Korean learners' acquisition of the English passive and explores learners' management of attention manipulated by the experimenter. The ability to generate passive sentences is substantially different between lower proficiency groups and high proficiency groups, and the patterns of using passive sentences are different, too. However, there is no difference between proficiency groups in the learners' perception of attention alternation manipulated by the experimenter.; The second experiment, which consists of a comprehension task and a production task, measures the effect of contextually appropriate input on the acquisition of second language grammar. The comprehension task provides Korean learners of English with two different types of input: congruent and noncongruent. Congruent input shows an appropriate relationship between mental representation and grammatical form regarding the English passive, while noncongruent input does not. The production task tests the learners' degree of learning the target structure by means of comparing the effects of the two different types of input. The results clearly indicate that the congruent input has substantial effect on the acquisition of the English passive, which is significantly different from the input that is not congruent.; Consequently, this dissertation is expected to contribute to the development of the theory of second language acquisition by showing how theories or methods of cognitive psychology can be employed to explain a process of second language acquisition.