Effects Of Awareness And Learning Condition On English L2 Development

This study investigated whether and how attentional demands of different learning conditions may affect learners' levels of awareness and their subsequent second language (L2) development. The think-aloud protocols were adopted to directly assess learners' cognitive processes during their exposure to L2 input.Forty Chinese EFL (English as a foreign language) learners were presented with the target structure (English past unreal conditional sentences) under three learning conditions that varied in the degree of attentional demands (rule-searching, rule-explanation, and enhanced conditions). They then performed a reading comprehension task containing the target structure and meanwhile kept thinking aloud. The participants' learning was measured by a multiple-choice recognition and controlled written production tests administered immediately after the treatment, and their levels of awareness were assessed by means of think-aloud protocols collected during the exposure task.The major findings are: 1) four levels of awareness were identified: No Verbal Report, Noticing, Looking for Rules and Understanding;2) the rule-explanation condition raised awareness at the highest level of understanding, whereas the rule-searching and enhanced conditions encouraged Looking for Rules and No Verbal Report respectively;3) greater awareness accompanied better recognition and production of the text-embedded target sentences, but not of the new target sentences.The results generally confirmed the positive relationship between attentional demands of learning conditions and levels of awareness, as well as the facilitative effects of awareness on L2 development. However, the meaning-oriented exposure task was found to have a negative effect on the learners' allocation of attentional resources to the targeted form.