5.1 Discussion
5.1.1 The theoretical framework
Despite the general result affirming the value of FonF, there exist minor gaps
among the different pedagogical activities and between the short-term and long-term
efficacy. While common principles of FonF may be of value to the students’ learning
of target forms, different activities are featured by different factors that might cause
the varied efficacy. Before detailed discussion, a reflection on FonF is desirable.
FonF and the aids in writing instruction
FonF is shown by the current study as effective in solidifying learners’ ability in
using certain English language form (past tense) in writing. As Long (1998) suggested,
“a crucial site for language development is… between learners and certain types of
written texts” (p. 22). In line with this notion, the result of the first research question
showed that FonF was able to raise learners’ consciousness, helping them notice the
target form, and further enable them to use the target form correctly, to a significant
extent. In writing instruction, thus, it is advisable to adopt the framework of FonF,
which involved a few essential principles and theoretical insights that cannot be
overlooked.
Widely and extensively portrayed as FonF has been, this notion encapsulates the
shift of learners’ attention triggered by the instructors, from meaning-driven context to
single language form, for the purpose of enabling the learners to learn a specific target
form.
Having said thus, the depiction entails setting of meaningful context, instructors’
attention maneuvering techniques (external and observable behavior), and the learner
awareness (shift of attention), where issues concerning one’s consciousness in
learning, such as noticing and processing, take place.
a premise for FonF to differentiate from focus on forms. This premise was established
in the current study to a great extent, in that writing in essence is meaning-driven, as
previously suggested. Though learners might from time to time paused to ponder over
suitable usage of language forms, most mental energy was concentrated on the
composition of the content. Fundamentally, writing itself is an arena for FonF, on
which various FonF activities can be conducted.
In the current study, all the three FonF pedagogical activities adopted provided
intervention initiated by the teacher, an external, observable behavior, for the purpose
of attention-shifting. The IE provided handouts with typographically enhanced target
form, the CF the feedback, and the PI the structured input.
External observable behaviors from the instructors consist of the former part of
“shift of attention.” The other part of it takes place within the learners’ internal mental
state, manifesting as noticing, which is not directly observable. Though subsumed
within the process of “shift of attention,” these two parts might not entirely
correspond with each other. What is offered by the instructors might not completely
result in what is received by the students. It requires empirical study to testify whether
learners actually noticed, which, in the current study, was done through the use of
questionnaires. The result is discussed in the next section.
Mediating the two parts is the instructors’ maneuvering of the learners’ attention.
The process is interactive in nature. This interactive nature of FonF contributes to the
efficacy to a great extent. By interaction, learners’ attention is drawn to “mismatches
between input and output…and can induce noticing of the kinds of forms for which a
pure diet of comprehensible input will not suffice” (Long, 1998). The notion that
focus on meaning is insufficient for enabling learner noticing of the target form
captures the essence of a view elaborated by DeKeyser (1998). Considering what
language forms are “most amenable to FonF,” he brought out a few linguistic
variables, one of which concerned the gap between L1 and L2. If one target form in
L2 does not find a counterpart in L1, and is thus itself a form not straightforward for
L2 learners to master, “then a rather strong variant of FonF…will be required” (p. 43).
In the current study, the target form was the English past tense, a form that is not
presented in learners’ L1, and this partially accounts for the rightful place and efficacy
of FonF.
Along with the insufficiency of positive evidence (focus on meaning), traditional
formal instruction (focus on forms) has its limitations as well. It fails to provide
meaningful context in which memory of the target form can be facilitated. As Ander
(2000) pointed out,
“…people tend to display better memories if they elaborate the material at study…semantic elaborations were particularly beneficial. Such semantic elaborations should facilitate the process of inference…we expect elaborative processing to lead to
inferences recalled” (p218).
Semantic elaborations, to a certain extent, are typical of meaning-enriched
context, which offers an ideal context for further process of meaning to match the
form. This is what focus on forms lack and what FonF offers to present.
Thus far, the examinations of the two stances (focus on meaning and focus on
forms) yield the insufficiency, and two issues in consciousness surface: noticing and
processing. Immersed in a context where meaning is entirely at focus, learners might
not have ample opportunities to notice specific language form. Similarly, in a course
filled with mechanical drill without meaningful context, processing, defined by Wong
(2005) as essentially the form-meaning connections, could hardly take place.
From within the two phases preceding and following the shift of attention (the
instructors’ maneuvering and the students’ learning) arises one account which shows
two issues in consciousness: noticing and processing. FonF features these two aspects,
which are not completely presented in a pure dose of each of the above teaching
stance (focus on meaning and focus on forms). There is insufficiency in either
noticing-elicitation or processing-facilitations. Focus on meaning, being the
meaning-oriented context, is relatively less capable of eliciting learner noticing of the
mismatch between input and output. Focus on forms, being the form instruction, fails
to provide semantic elaboration in which the memory of target structure can be
embedded: in a course filled with mechanical drill without meaningful context,
processing, which is in essence the form-meaning connections (Wong, 2005), could
hardly take place. In short, where focus on meaning and focus on forms are
insufficient, FonF rightfully takes over.
Learner awareness in each treatment
Further consideration of writing instruction inevitably involves the issue of
efficacy and thus brings to the surface the differences among the three pedagogical
activities, IE, CF and PI. Unveiled by the current study, IE was significantly less
effective than CF, which is in turn subordinate to PI in terms of efficacy. One of the
variables affecting the efficacy involves an issue of consciousness, that is, the learner
awareness, at the very least, learner noticing, as Schmidt (1995) illustrated, “noticing
concerns learners’ consciousness and questions concerning the role of consciousness
in learning, however difficult to answer, are important to all.” Schmidt further
suggested, “what learners notice in input is what becomes intake for learning” (1995).
Therefore, to account for the differences in the efficacy of each treatment, the factors
that might contribute to learner awareness (noticing), as well as what learner noticing
helps to contribute (processing), should be exploited deeper.
Noticing
Noticing is of crucial status in FonF. As previously stated, by mediating the two
stances of language teaching, meaning immersion and form instruction, FonF entails
shift of attention, triggered by instructors’ observable behavior and completed by
learners’ awareness involvement. Yet, FonF does not always generate a precise
correlation between them. That is to say, these two stages do not always match
correspondingly; as Long pointed out, “what it is hoped that a pedagogical activity
will achieve and what it actually achieves are not necessarily the same” (Long, 1998).
Since the latter half of shift of attention, the learner noticing, leads to subsequent
intake, and since it is this final state of intake that determines how effective the
different ways presenting the input actually are, the more learner noticing one certain
FonF pedagogical activity induces, the more effective it is. The crucial point for the
outcome, then, is located on the learner noticing. Long expressed his recognition
accordingly, “The intended outcome of focus on form is … noticing” (Long, 1998, p.
24).
Noticing is primarily a mental occurrence which is not tangible and thus not
directly observable. One way to elicit reflection of learners’ mental operation is
through means of questionnaire:
“At the very least, these measures should include debriefing questionnaires to
probe the extent to which learners were focused on form during the instructional treatments, rather than assuming that the instructional treatment translated directly into the quality of learner attention and awareness” (Long, 1998, p40)
In the current study, to examine the extent of participants’ noticing, the means of
questionnaires was adopted and carried out during the intervention. The ratios of
noticing within each group (calculated according to the formula: the number of
participants within a group who noticed the target form/the number of all the
participants within a group * 100%) are 42.86% (IE), 53.85 (CF), and 85.29 % (PI).
The ratio of each group reflects the relative efficacy as addressed in the second
research question. The mean difference showed that IE was the less effective of the
three, CF in the middle, and PI the most effective one. Considerable support for the
view that noticing leads to subsequent intake and final efficacy can be thus gained. To
benefit the learners, means must be taken to activate noticing. One of the means to
trigger learner noticing, among others, might be the factor of interaction.
In IE, the intervention was not interactive in essence, due to the fact that it was
given before participants actually write and therefore not a response per se to the
participants’ output in any form. In addition, it was confined to the presentation of a
paper-based document, on which there was only the reading material where the target
form was underlined and printed in boldface type. The participants could only rely on
themselves to read, without extra assistance or guidance. Under the circumstance, it
was expected that, upon reading the words with the target form, whose visual saliency
had been enhanced, the learners would notice the target form, and by noticing the
learners would get to apply it correctly. However, the actual conduction of IE did not
reflect so. In the questionnaires filled by the group IE, 15 out of 35 participants
reported that they did notice it was the past tense that was particularly marked. In
other words, up to 20 participants did not notice so. The ratio of learner noticing was
42.86% (15/35*100%).
Apparently, the visual salience did not guarantee thorough comprehension of the
target form from the learners. It might be true that visual salience is capable of getting
the learners’ attention, enabling them to linger the eyesight on the enhanced form
longer, and learners might actually detect the visual differences between enhanced
form and the other parts of the reading material. Yet, if the detection of the visual
salience fails to arouse subsequent noticing, in which learners make sense of the
enhanced form, tagging it with the metalinguistic knowledge they learned before, the
stimulus of the visual salience is probably less capable than other more interactive
means. The matching of form and meaning constitutes the input processing
mechanism, without which further processing and internalization would not be
possible. The contribution of textual enhancement to the efficacy, along with the
efficacy itself, is consequently quite limited.
In terms of the noticing-activating capability, another treatment, CF, was quite
different from IE. This is partially due to the fact that involvement of interaction is
different. In CF, the feedback given to the learners was “corrective” in essence. It was
a response to the output generated by the learners. Though the marking of the
mistakes resembles the visual enhancement in IE, it is more capable of arousing
learner noticing. The reason is largely due to the effect of the previously stated factor,
interaction, in which, by offering correction, CF draws learners’ attention to the
mismatch between their self-generated output of the target form and its accurate usage.
Therefore, though IE and CF both made use of written input, CF entailed learners’
interaction to the written form to a greater extent than IE did, and the interaction
contributed to more learner noticing. As shown by the outcome of the questionnaires,
21 learners out of 39 in the group of CF did notice it was the past tense that they had
incorrectly used, had been marked and corrected. The ratio of learner noticing was
53.85% (21/39*100%).
Interaction is also one characteristic of PI, and perhaps one of its main features.
Instead of merely receiving input/stimulus given by the instructor, learners have to do
something during the phase of structured input activities. Though strictly speaking,
the interaction does not resemble the genuine interaction found in authentic setting,
e.g., the give-and-take of meanings, negotiations going on between two interlocutors,
etc., PI does arouse similar mental work of processing. Learners respond to the
questions, simultaneously receiving varying answers from their counterparts, which, if
differed, would trigger learner noticing of the mismatch between their own answers
and others’ answers, and thus enable further processing within the learners. This
process resembles what Interaction Hypothesis suggests: noticing the mismatch
between one’s own output and previous input one received (Long, 1981). Furthermore,
in addition to the referential structured input activity, there is the affective structured
input activity as well, where learners are encouraged to express their own meanings
using the target structure. Genuine interaction is enabled even more at this phase. This
engagement of learners in communication of meanings and interactions reflects a
corresponding high ratio of learner noticing. Out of 34 participants in PI, 29 did notice
the target form as the English past tense, generating a ratio of 85.29 % (29/34*100%).
The differences among the noticing ratios reflect to a certain extent the fact that
the amount of interaction generated by each treatment is different, which may be due
to the explicitness of the information about the target form that was presented. It may
not arouse much interaction when it is presented implicitly, where information about
the input is not directly presented to the learner. For example, in IE and CF,
information about the target form, the English past tense was not made clear. One
provided enhanced form, and the other provided accurate form (in response to the
incorrectly used form from the learners). Neither told the learners directly that it was
the past tense that was emphasized. For learners to interact with written
symbolizations, then, meanings must be extracted. How explicit the meanings were
presented in turn influences how much noticing there would be. In an implicit
presentation of the target form, such as the one used in IE, learners needed to decide
what visually enhanced form is implied. That is to say, they needed to process what
information the boldface type and underline (as used in the current study) were telling
them about the target form. This stage entailed great mental work, requiring learners
to think (process) about what they saw. Some might manage to get it right, others
might apply metalinguistic knowledge other than the target form (e.g., past participle),
and there might be still others who might altogether ignore the enhanced form, opting
to read the content first, since there was the time constraints allotted for reading
session. Consequently, such implicit presentation of the target form might not be able
to narrow learners’ attention down to what is expected of them to notice. This is
especially the case when the target form is complex and thus not straightforward for
the learners to apply knowledge that they have not completely acquired. As DeKeyser
stated:
“Two factors conspire to determine … whether the learner must induce an abstract rule, in which case the structure is harder to notice without explicit focus on form. The first factor is surface variation that tends to conceal the rule… The second factor that
elements” (DeKeyser, 1998, p46)
These two factors precisely describe the past tense of English verbs. There is the
irregularity of the past verb, which tends to conceal the surface rule of regular past
tense. The agreement between the verb and the time frame can be far apart, or nearly
entirely hidden from viewing, due to the fact that story-telling is set in the past, and
thus sometimes the time clue is not stated. This entire abstraction about the English
past tense makes it difficult for learners to rely on pure input of positive evidence or
visually enhanced form to learn well, which was further illustrated by DeKeyser,
“…although implicit learning of similarity patterns is possible, implicit learning of
abstract rules is not” (DeKeyser, 1998, p. 45). To tackle the abstraction, implicit input
therefore seems to be insufficient. In addition, in the current study, the implicit input
is confined to the format of written language. Learners’ attention might not be fully
potentialized.
Dwelling on this notion about learners’ attention might be another factor that
contributes to the less capability of written format in arousing learner noticing. As
Robinson suggested, “important to a theory of SLA that allows a central role to the act
of noticing is a specification of the nature of the attentional mechanisms involved, and
of their relationship to current models of the organization for memory” (Robinson,
1995). Implicit written input seems less than competent, when viewed either in Filter
Theories or Capacity Theories. One example of Filter Theories, proposed by
Broadbent (1958), the “bottleneck” model, suggested that one selective attention
mechanism (filter) would be at work, selecting the information (input) to come in and
save for later processing. This, along with the aid of VanPatten’s view that “Learners
process content words in the input before anything else” (VanPatten, 2004, p. 8), will
make it apparent for one to infer that learners, when exposed with a mixture of written
content from which they need to process the form and meaning, will tend to process
meaning first, with the target form being filtered out. Noticing ratio of the two
treatments which adopted written form could be expectedly low in that learners need
to register the meaning first, which might already be a demanding task for them. This
can also account for the possibility that the awareness involved in IE was mostly
limited to detection only, not to the level of noticing, since it was filtered out.
Capacity theories, on the other hand, deeming the attentional resource from a
perspective different from the Filter Theories, proposed that there might be “pools” of
attentional resources from which one can make use of. Wickens expanded the concept
and divided them into three dimensions: (a) perceptual/cognitive vs. response process;
(b) analog/spatial vs. verbal linguistic; and (c) auditory vs. visual and vocal vs.
manual. One particular emphasis here is that “attentional demands of tasks, and so
their relative difficulty, will be increased when concurrently performed tasks draw
simultaneously on the same pool of resources” (Wickens, 1989). Inferences can be
made at this point that when input is entirely presented to the learners in form of
made at this point that when input is entirely presented to the learners in form of