Attention, Awareness, and Foreign Language Behavior

The 1990s have witnessed a substantial increase of empirical studies in the secondforeign language (L2) classroom setting that have in some way addressed L2 learning under a so‐called form‐focused perspective. A review of many of these studies reveals that attempts are usually made through some kind of instructional treatment or exposure designed t o draw learners' attention to and subsequent noticing of targeted linguistic forms in the L2 data or input. Strands of research include input flooding, input enhancement, implicit/explicit learning conditions, processing instruction, explicit/implicit feedback, and classroom‐based tasks. The theoretical premise underlying these studies is that some form of attention (and awareness) to linguistic data is crucial for L2 learning to take place, a premise not addressed methodologically in many of the studies (cf Leow, 1999a, for a methodological review of studies conducted under an attentional framework in the 1990s). My study in this volume is part of a series of empirical investigations (cf. Leow, 1998a, 1998b, 2000; Rosa Leow, this volume, 1998a, 1998b; Rosa & O'ei11, 1999) have all found similar results revealing that some participants in one group were performing similarly to those in other groups. The roles of attention and awareness, without doubt, are areas of research that warrant further research in SLA. The current challenge to researchers is to test further the theoretical approaches to the roles of attention and awareness in SLA and improve the operationalization of both attention and what constitutes awareness in L2 learning in studies conducted under an attentional framework in the classroom setting (Leow, 199913). In addition, the use of multiple data elicitation procedures (both online and offline) and the need for both quantitative and qualitative analyses of elicited data can only improve the research designs of future attentional studies (cf. Leow, 1999a, 2000).