REFUERZO EDUCATIVO

As the review of prior research work on dyadic interaction showed, both the input and output period were concerned with focus on form and noticing the gap during

current study fits in and also adds to the extant body of work on SLA through language use during dyadic interaction centers on the linkage between episodes of collaborative dialogue around the target idioms and focus on form as well as noticing.

The fitness of the current study in terms of focus on form is evidenced in three ways. First of all, idioms are non-compositional formulaic language whose overall meanings are usually different from their constituent components, and there is often a distance between the literal and figurative/metaphorical meaning of an idiom. These unique syntactic and semantic features make idioms the “creative” or “playful” use of language that is deeply rooted in “the colorful, cultural aspects of language” (O’Keeffe, McCarthy, & Carter, 2007, p. 95). The disparities between the lexical composition and the figurative expression of the target idioms, however, were very likely to draw ESL learners’ attention to their formal properties while decoding their meaning during dyadic interaction. The cognitive efforts involved in this process were also quite likely to raise their awareness of the mappings between form and meaning. Additionally, in the current study, the target idioms were highlighted and therefore made salient to ESL learners. This followed the textual or input enhancement principle (Sharwood Smith, 1993; White, 1998) and improved the perception of L2 forms. Most importantly, in collaborating on the

meaning of the target idioms, ESL learners read the excerpts and engaged in task-focused online discussions. In other words, their attention to form “occurs in interaction where the primary focus is on meaning” (Ellis et al., 2002, p. 421). Furthermore, since learners used English for resolving the L2 problems they had encountered, they “function primarily as ‘language users’ rather than as ‘learners’ when they perform the task” (Ellis, 2003, p. 252), and these two characteristics are the manifestation of focus on form instruction.

Areas that this study adds to focus on form include the examination of teacher- initiated preemptive focus on form. While Swain and her co-researchers’ studies on collaborative dialogue were largely concerned with incidental focus on the L2 forms that were selected by the students, the current study explored attention to the L2 forms that were intended and preselected by ESL instructors. As Ellis (2008) suggested, preemptive focus on form is often student-initiated and addresses “actual gaps in the students’ knowledge whereas teacher-initiated focus-on-form only dealt with forms the teacher hypothesized might be problematic” (p. 811). While quite cogent, this statement seems to leave out the possible matches between student-initiated and teacher-initiated focus on form. This study thus employed a pre-test to determine the actual gaps in ESL learners’ L2 systems and sought to assess the extent to which “teachers’ intended pedagogical focus and students’ actual attentional focus” overlapped (Long & Robinson, 1998, p. 24). Additionally, given the paucity of empirical evidence on the effects of teacher-initiated preemptive focus on form on SLA, the results of this study provided preliminary data to reveal the linkage between these two.

The compatibility of this study with noticing can be demonstrated by the Comprehensible Output Hypothesis. For noticing the gap, in comparing the use of the target idioms in their contexts during the completion of the idiom learning tasks, ESL learners were provided the opportunities of noticing what is lacking in their interlanguage. Particularly in deciphering the figurative meaning of the target idioms, learners were more likely to be aware of the inadequacies in their current knowledge since “The more creative and innovative the input, the greater the chances of noticing and remembering it” (Tocalli-Beller, 2005, p. 25). For hypothesis formulation and testing, L2 learners’ guesses

of the meaning of the target idioms from the contextual information and their correction of the improper use reflected what they thought the definitions might be. For metaltalk, because most of the collaborative dialogue episodes in this study revolved around individual target idioms, they were the indicators of the aspects that ESL learners attended to in the process of mapping the form and meaning relationships. Since collaborative dialogue manifested ESL learners’ cognitive activities, they provided a snapshot of what they had noticed and how their noticing might be influenced by their partners, and thereby illustrated their learning in progress.

The current study also adds to the research on noticing in three ways. First of all, while prior studies examined noticing the gap in light of learners’ reflection on their own or their peers’ L2 production during the completion of communicative tasks, in this study, ESL learners compared and contrasted examples of the target language provided by the teacher with their existing knowledge about English idioms. Therefore, their noticing the gap was directed and intentional rather than random and accidental. Second, unlike the single words or brief phrases in previous studies, this study focused on the aspects of language that were noticed by ESL leaners when grappling with idioms as multi-word units. Third, instead of solely relying on LREs as the sources for measuring noticing, this study used introspective data such as ESL learners’ comments during stimulated recalls for a more thorough and accurate understanding of noticing the gap.