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PARTICIPACIÓN DE CONSULTORES

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2. ADECUACIONES AL PROYECTO

2.8. PARTICIPACIÓN DE CONSULTORES

writing pedagogy for college students, all of which have been theoretically and empirically supported. Following is my rationale for the use of the NH as a basis for my proposed instruction on source use for college students. These discussions are aimed at providing a sound theoretical foundation for using SLA in the development of the writing teaching materials for college students.

Researchers have indicated the potential of using SLA theories to improve FY writing pedagogy by showing their relationships in a number of ways. Bailey (2011) maintains that SLA theories can lend a new perspective to first-year writing pedagogy by introducing the

interlanguage concept from SLA to the writing instruction for college students. The term of interlanguage in SLA refers to “the systematic knowledge of an L2 which is independent of both these learners’ L1 and the target language” (Ellis, 2012, p.968). Bailey (2011) uses this term to argue for the existence of a systematic and coherent linguistic system in college students’ writings produced in their college-level composition courses. In his reasoning, the spoken language is considered as the native language or L1, and the written language is the target language or L2. He purports that “the language that the students write with in FYC is a type of interlanguage, a negotiation set up between the writer’s LI and L2” (Bailey, 2011, p.5). The

argument on the need for seeing writing as an acquired system of language use for native speakers of English is strongly grounded on the assumption that the spoken and written English languages are distinct systems.

The assumption of the distinction between conversation and writing has been well- supported with both theoretical and empirical evidence of the unique features of each language system. Significantly, Biber, Gray, and Papoon (2011) have found that most clausal

subordination measures (e.g., Wh-clause, that-clause) are more common in conversation than in academic writing while most phrasal complexity measures (e.g., complex noun phrases) are more pervasive in academic writing than in conversation. Based on their comparison of grammatical complexity features in conversation versus academic writing, Biber et al. (2011) have provided a strong hypothesis about “the developmental progression” of linguistic

complexity in L1. According to them, because conversation is acquired before the acquisition of the grammar of writing, the grammatical structures in formal writing represent a much higher complexity level than those in conversation. Also, the acquisition of these grammatical structures in formal writing does not happen naturally to native speakers of English.

In order to test Biber et al.’s (2011) hypothesized developmental sequence, Staples, Egbert, Biber, and Gray (2016) conducted the first corpus-based study to examine the development of phrasal and clausal complexity features across level of study, discipline, and genre among college-level L1 writers. The results of the study indicated that the undergraduates, who are native speakers of English in their study, follow the hypothesized developmental

progression. For example, as the educational level increases, student writers will use fewer finite dependent clauses and more dependent phrases including noun phrases with more noun

English college students has corroborated the position that academic writing is not anyone’s mother tongue, and expecting students to learn to write like professionals or to produce academic prose in FY composition courses by themselves may be not realistic.

Many other studies have also investigated the linguistic features of college-level student writings to illuminate the first-language writing development of L1 college writers. First, Bailey’s (2011) analysis of linguistic features in writing samples of three undergraduates has shown that the written language produced by college students is a type of SLA interlanguage between the spoken language and written language. The three student writers in his study were described to represent three different writing levels in two different courses of a college-level writing program. The linguistic examination of the writing samples has revealed that linguistic features are “indicative of a dynamic, and sometimes even conflicting, negotiation between their LI (spoken language) and L2 (written language)” (Bailey, 2011, p.5). For example, the sample by the student writer at the lowest level of L2 acquisition has more occurrences of L1 features (e.g., dominant use of relative clauses introduced by “that” in a repetitious manner) than the ones written by the two student writers at higher levels of L2 acquisition.

The findings of large-scale studies on language-level patterns of college student writings across writing levels have added more empirical support for Bailey’s (2011) argument for the existence of the interlanguage by college students in their process of acquiring the written language. First, different from academic expert writers who equally use both hedges (e.g.,

sometimes, may, might) and boosters (e.g., always, never, should, must) to construct their claims, the first-year college writers tend to use many boosters and construct “less measured claims” (Aull, 2015, p.97). Furthermore, the student writers of higher-graded essays are more likely to employ contesting resources (i.e., words or phrases conveying negative and critical evaluation

such as lack of, flaw) more often in their writings than those of lower-graded papers (Lancaster, 2014). The student writers of higher-graded argumentative essays also use a greater variety and sophistication of stance-taking devices (i.e., words or phrases to show one’s attitudes towards a cited proposition or idea such as probably, certainly, evidentially, or modal verbs) than those of lower-graded ones. These findings on written language development among college students have strengthened Bailey’s (2011) recognition of the interlanguage by L1 students of English in their FY writing courses.

According to Bailey (2011), the introduction of the interlanguage concept to college- level writing pedagogy brings a new perspective on first-language writing development which will lead to changes in instructors’ expectations about student writings in college-level

composition courses and modifications to their pedagogy in these courses. These changes will better reflect how students acquire the written language throughout their college years and beyond. He suggests that college-level writing instruction should take a more acquisition- centered approach in order to help students to develop their writing skills effectively. Bailey (2011) provides a plethora of ideas to improve college-level writing pedagogy. For example, an instructor should surround students with target written language that they are required to

produce. Also, students should be provided with some metalinguistic awareness, which is

defined as “awareness of what language is, of how it works, of terms that can be used to describe it,” because such knowledge will facilitate students’ acquisition of academic writing in a long term (Bailey, 2011, p.206).

On the grounds of the potential benefits of introducing SLA theories to college-level writing pedagogy, I will provide my rationale for the incorporation of the Noticing Hypothesis in SLA into my proposed instruction on source use for college students. The Noticing Hypothesis

has been considered as a critical theoretical view in SLA. It explains that learners’ acquisition of linguistic input is more likely to increase if their attention is consciously drawn to linguistic features. Schmidt (1990, 2001), who was the first to propose this hypothesis, maintains that noticing precedes understanding and is a condition which is necessary for converting input into intake (as cited in Ellis, 2012, pp. 265-272). The next subsection provides specific claims in the Noticing Hypothesis that are relevant for the development and evaluation of the materials in this study.

Noticing Hypothesis

The Noticing Hypothesis (NH) postulates the roles of noticing in second language acquisition, and the importance of attention in noticing and awareness in the acquisition process. The NH has several claims that can be summarized below:

1. Schmidt claims that learners need to notice language in order to learn it. This idea is contrary to the belief that learners just pick up language from being immersed in an environment with plentiful linguistic input. In his words, noticing is “the necessary and sufficient condition for the conversion of input into intake” (Schmidt, 1993, p. 209), where intake in SLA is usually defined as a subset of the input that has been taken in or comprehended by the learner, and affects their developing language system, and it also occurs at a preliminary stage along the acquisition process (Van Patten & Benati, 2015).

Schmidt (2010) also makes a clear distinction between noticing and understanding by indicating that they are two levels of awareness. In SLA, awareness is defined as “a particular state of mind in which an individual has undergone a specific subjective experience of some cognitive content or external stimulus” (Tomlin & Villa, 1994, p. 193). It may be demonstrated through (a) some resulting behavioral or cognitive change,

(b) a meta-report of the experience but without any metalinguistic description of a targeted underlying rule, or (c) a metalinguistic description of a targeted underlying rule (Leow, 2001). According to Schmidt (2001), noticing is the lower level of awareness and refers to the conscious registration of attended specific instances of language, or attention to “elements of the surface structure of utterances in the input, instances of language, rather than any abstract rules or principles of which such instances may be exemplars.” (p.3). On the other hand, understanding is at the higher level of awareness, and includes generalizations across instances such as knowledge of rules and metalinguistic awareness of linguistic features (Schmidt, 2001).

According to the hypothesis, whereas awareness at the level of noticing leads to mere intake, the awareness level of understanding promotes deeper learning marked by restructuring and system learning and is underscored by learners’ ability to analyze, compare, and test hypotheses. In other words, noticing is necessary for SLA, and understanding is facilitative but not required. Therefore, the only linguistic elements in the input that learners can acquire are those elements that they notice.

2. Attention, which is also defined as a cognitive process involving the ability to select and focus on particular stimuli from the environment while ignoring others, is responsible for noticing and controls access to awareness (Schmidt, 2001, p. 3). Therefore, learners must actively attend to linguistic stimuli in order to learn. In addition, learners’ acquisition of linguistic input is more likely to increase if their attention is consciously drawn to linguistic features (Schmidt, 1990, 1993, 2001, 2010). While many features and

characteristics of the target language might influence and determine whether learners are able to notice a form in the input (e.g., frequency; perceptual saliency, and

communicative value of a given form/structure), other external factors including complexity and distributional characteristics of input, instructional treatment, and task characteristics (e.g., task requirements, task instructions, and input enhancement techniques) can affect what learners attend to and notice in input processing.

Barbieri and Eckhart (2007) also continue to expand the discussion on how corpus-based teaching materials help learners with noticing in order to learn a language feature based on White’s (1998) hypothesis on the role of input enhancement in noticing. Accordingly, it is hypothesized that an input flood coupled with typographical

enhancement will help direct the learners’ attention to the targeted features and facilitate noticing. In SLA, an input flood refers to one particular type of learning opportunity where learners are exposed to multiple instances of the particular linguistic feature to be learned. Typographical enhancement is a relatively implicit technique of input

enhancement, which is broadly defined as an attempt to make a certain linguistic form salient to L2 learners by manipulating characteristics of input to direct learners’ attention and increase perceptual salience. For example, Chapelle (2001) discusses various ways that computer-assisted language learning resources can enhance input such as the use of different colors to facilitate learners’ attention and noticing of crucial aspects of the input 3. The processes of noticing (i.e., registering formal features in the input) and noticing the

gap (i.e., identifying how the input to which the learner is exposed differs from the output the learner is able to generate) are distinct and both essential in L2 acquisition (Schmidt, 2010, p.724). The greatest distinction is that noticing the gap is more likely to occur during learners’ production. Because producing the language requires precision, learners will be able to notice the gap when knowledge is missing to produce the precise language

needed. As a result, noticing the gap helps them avoid errors in their production. Therefore, Schmidt (2010) suggests that instruction should facilitate learners’ ability to notice the gap between their output and target language input in order to help them acquire a language feature effectively.

Overall, noticing is hypothesized to provide favorable conditions for second language acquisition in SLA theories. Meanwhile, as discussed earlier, the learning to write of L1 English undergraduates in college-level writing courses can be conceived of as a process of acquiring a second language. Therefore, the integration of the NH into my proposed pedagogy on source use is expected to facilitate students’ acquisition of using external sources in their writings. The next section continues to present how the DDL approach in Corpus Linguistics can be incorporated in the integrated theoretical framework for the development of the teaching materials in this study. 2.2.3. Data-driven Language Learning and Its Relevance to the Materials Development

The term of data-driven language learning (DDL), which was initially coined by Johns (1991), refers to a learning approach where learners are given access to more substantial amount of corpus data through the direct use of a corpus (i.e., a systemic collection of naturally occurring discourses including both spoken and written language) and a concordancer (i.e., an electronic tool to display concordances of actual examples of language use). Therefore, to adopt this pedagogy, two resources including a corpus and a tool to exploit the corpus are necessary (Gilquin & Granger, 2010). According to Johns (1991), giving learners direct access to concordances is the best way to explore the facts of linguistic use and develop their life-long language learning skills. The approach has also been developed and expanded since then (Aull, 2015; Flowerdew, 2015; Gilquin & Granger, 2010). There have been several claims about language learning and teaching in this approach, which are summarized below.

First, learners study the patterns of language use in a corpus mostly through observing concordances, and they figure out for themselves how a word or a phrase is used in the DDL approach (Johns, 1991, 1994). Aull (2015) further discusses how the patterns of language use through genre-based linguistic analyses can help student writers learn about writing. According to her, “sharing corpus-based patterns with students is ideally a way of helping students become more able to recognize the connection between writing expectations and concrete choices they have for their writing. In this fashion, it is a way to present students with options for their writing along with opportunities for deciphering why such patterns are convincing in a given rhetorical task” (Aull, 2015, p. 161).

As a result, inductive learning, which stimulates inquiry and helps learners to see patterns or generalizations because they are working with linguistic data, is the heart of the DDL

approach. Moreover, learners have to become active in order to succeed in this learning approach, and teachers become facilitators of the learners’ inductive learning. Learners in the DDL approach are thus described as “travelers” (Bernardini, 2002, p.22) or “researchers” (Johns, 1997, p. 101). However, the DDL approach has been criticized because of its high cognitive demand on learners, although Johns believes that most students are “remarkable” enough to handle it (1994). Moreover, Gilquin and Granger (2010) argue that because inductive learning includes the element of discovery, it makes DDL more fun and motivating to learners.

Secondly, the NH with its underlying psycholinguistic processes plays an important role in the DDL approach (Flowerdew, 2015; Papp, 2007). Papp (2007, p. 209) states that the

noticing hypothesis helps explain how learners can notice the discrepancies between the language they produce and the language they encounter in DDL activities:

First of all, learners need to be paying attention to form (Schmidt 2001; Robinson 2003), and they need to be able to consciously notice features of their

interlanguage grammar (ILG) and the target language (Truscott, 1998). Then, they need to be able to use inductive learning mechanisms to be able to make

generalizations, analogies, and discern patterns in the target (Shaffer 1989). Next, they need to compare their ILG with the L2 (Klein 1986:62; James & Garret 1991:19), and find mismatches and discrepancies. This is what Kavaliauskiene [2003] called ‘a qualitative leap to conscious cognition.’

In addition, Flowerdew (2015, p. 20) argues that “concordance-based tasks requiring students to attend to recurrent phrases would seem to be an ideal means for enhancing learners’s input via noticing, leading to uptake.” She asserts that inductive learning as a mainstay of DDL “is entirely dependent on noticing,” which can be either student-initiated, involving spontaneous noticing by the learner, or teacher-directed. In teacher-directed noticing activities, students are prompted by the teacher to examine specific language points.

Many scholars have been supporting the guided induction approach in DDL activities in order to promote learners’ inductive learning so that students can develop habits of observing language in use and noticing usage, and become aware of language choices. Johansson (2009) defines the guided-inductive learning approach as “a combination of an inductive and a

deductive approach where the elements of explanation and corpus use are tailored according to the needs of the student” (p. 42). Smart (2014) continues to expand the concept of guided induction by describing it as “an approach that provides a structured, scaffolded framework for inductive learning, places the learner at the center of the learning task, with the learner seeking to discover the nature of the grammar structure through interacting with the language” (p. 187). In other words, DDL instruction should be given to scaffold language learners to help them develop input processing strategies and activate the higher-order cognitive skills associated with

inductive learning when working on DDL activities. Specifically, guided inductive learning instruction should facilitate learners’ selective attention to form and meaning connections of the

input by devising instructional activities that equip learners with conscious rules, or help them interpret the functional meanings of specific forms in the input. An example of guided induction is the ‘4Is’ DDL instruction proposed by Flowerdew (2009, p. 407). These 4Is stand for (1) illustration (looking at data), (2) interaction (discussion and sharing observations and opinions), (3) intervention (optional phrase where teachers facilitate learners’ inductive learning), and (4) induction (making one’s own rule for a particular feature).

Thirdly, the DDL approach helps learners focus on language use and raises their awareness about it, which results in a much more nuanced understanding of language use because their discovery of the target features is placed at the center of learning (Aull, 2015; Flowerdew, 2015; Johns, 1994). Johns elaborates that if we are concerned with both language function and form then we must use a “far more extensive, authentic, unmodified data than has been traditional in language teaching” (1994, p.294). In addition, because DDL affects both the process and the product of language learning, it is more transferable. Supporting Johns’ claim, Aull (2015) also asserts that that sharing and discussing linguistic patterns of language use across contexts also help foster students’ awareness of language use and the underlying values or

expectations about language use within each context or genre. That awareness is also indicated to be important for developing students’ writing knowledge beyond academic genres or facilitating their transfer (Aull, 2015, p.161).

Gilquin and Granger (2010) continue to rely on the proposed cognitive processes in DDL by O’ Sullivan (2007) to support the claim on the higher likelihood of transfer through DDL activities. According to O’ Sullivan (2007), learners can acquire a number of crucial learning skills through the use of DDL activities which are “predicting, observing, noticing, thinking, reasoning, analyzing, interpreting, reflecting, exploring, making inferences (inductively or

deductively), focusing, guessing, comparing, differentiating, theorizing, hypothesizing, and verifying” ( p. 277). According to Gilquin and Granger (2010), “since these skills are general cognitive skills, they may be also transferred to other fields of study.” (p. 360).