Attending to Form and Content in the Input

This study explores the question of whether or not learners can consciously attend to both form and meaning when processing input. An experimental procedure is presented in which three levels of learners in four groups were asked to process information under four different conditions: attention to meaning alone; simultaneous attention to meaning and an important lexical item; simultaneous attention to meaning and a grammatical functor; and simultaneous attention to meaning and a verb form. Results suggest that learners, in particular early stage learners, have great difficulty in attending to both form and content. These results raise important questions for current discussions of the role of consciousness in input processing.