Pre-task Planning and Attention to Meaning: Debilitating or Facilitative?

1. Pre-task Planning and Attention to Meaning: Debilitating or Facilitative? Lourdes Ortega University of Hawai‘i 1st TBLT Conference, Leuven September 21-23, 2005

2. Clear findings: Complexity Fluency Mixed findings: Accuracy?? Planned discourse is more accurate only in some studies (e.g., Ellis & Yuan, 2005) but not others (Elder & Iwashita, 2005), and with some measures but not others L2 pre-task planning

3. What are the benefits? “…extrapolating from performance to acquisition”… (Ellis, 2005, p. 17)

4. “extrapolating from performance to acquisition”: • P: Improved retrieval and rehearsal operations during pre-task planning  • A: Automatization & proceduralization fostered in the long run

5. “extrapolating from performance to acquisition”: • P: Heightened strategic attention to form during pre-task planning  • A: More instance and rule learning opportunities from noticing and hypothesis testing, and from increased attention to specific grammatical forms

6. “extrapolating from performance to acquisition”: • P: Syntactic processing during planned production (controlled but speeded up processing, pushed output)  • A: More on-line noticing and hypothesis testing, more monitoring, improved cue-strengthening and reorganization of form-function mappings

7. Two contrasting SLA positions: • Meaning-first is a debilitating force in L2 learning (information processing theories) • Meaning-making is a catalyst for L2 learning (connectionist-emergentist functional theories)

8. Limited capacity model of attention: form-meaning competition L2 development occurs through automatization/proceduralization The meaning-first “threat”: learners’ inclination for ad hoc solutions Task manipulation needed for balancing tasks’ cognitive complexity, communicative demands, and focus on accuracy Skehan’s (1998, 2002) TBLL model:

9. Multiple-resource model of attention: successful time-shared allocation of cognitive resources is possible L2 development proceeds via form/function mapping, cue strengthening, chunking, bootstrapping during performance Increased cognitive complexity of tasks leads to deeper processing and more attention being directed to input and output Robinson’s (2001) TBLL model:

10. Today’s data: Post-task interviews with 44 Spanish FL learners in Ortega (1995), (1999), and (2005)

11. Having extra time & writing notes helped to: Organize thoughts Formulate thoughts Help lexical retrieval Practice/rehearse Improve content & lexical choice But writing notes also facilitated a focus on form: Help grammatical retrieval Help monitor grammar Reported benefits of planning:

12. Grammatical retrieval: I was able to figure out which conjugations I could use [99002] I could see where I was supposed to put articles and that stuff [99006] When I was writing it’s like I remembered the subjuntivo, so I used it [99015]

13. Monitoring strategies:

14. Sensitivity to peer’s needs led speakers to prioritize meaning: Structured organization of content Keeping language/vocabulary simple Keep going (reluctance to stop and self-correct) Slowing down to buy time for listener But the presence of a listener also facilitated a focus on form: Attention to grammar that is essential for listener’s understanding Orientation to listener’s needs:

15. Meaning-essential grammar: ‘Cause there were two of them [two people in the story], so I had to make it in the ellos {they} form, I don’t know. [...] ...’Cause I think that that would have helped her, cause she would know how many people were there in the picture and stuff. [95012] [in the third story, planned] I didn't care anymore about making mistakes, but then not like mistakes where you use the wrong verb tense or the totally wrong word and you throw the person off. [99009]

16. A tension between attention to meaning & form? Not really… • True, many learners prioritized getting the message across to the listener over being accurate, fluent, or complex, and… • …this listener orientation may have deterred learners from engaging in propositional, lexical, and/or syntactic complexity and it may have made some speakers avoid self-corrections during online performance and pressured them to prioritize fluency over accuracy… • At the same time, it also led to a heightened process of meaning-form mapping, by priming many learners to attend to certain aspects of grammar that were perceived as essential for the listener’s understanding

17. Furthermore… • Many learners exploited different funds of explicit knowledge to guide their strategic behavior during planning… • … and they also paid attention to formal aspects of the language of low communicative value

18. Attention to form drawing from explicit grammar knowledge: Like if the verb was invitar I’d go, -o-as-a ... invita [I: So you would actually go through the verbs?] Yeah. I do that all the time. And I want to make sure that I got at least the right person.” [95011] Like that personal a thing {rule for prepositional marking of human direct object} and, you know, the possessive adjectives and, the verb tenses, saying them right, and gender agreement, things like that. And like ser and estar, when to use those... Yeah, I was thinking of that as well as trying to say it. [95006]

19. Attention to grammar of low communicative value: • Reflexive verbs: The grammar and stuff too, I don’t know how to put it, like se preocupa mucho {s/he worries a lot}? it worries, I know it’s supposed to mean it worries them so I guess it is le preocupa {he worries}, but I get that confused a lot, like even if I wanted to say the boys hit the ball, would it be se pegan {they hit each other} or would it just be pegan {they hit} [99003] • Articles: [I: What did you do during the preparation time?] I wrote all the story [laughs] cause then I can see like where I was supposed to put articles and that stuff so if I can see it then it’s a little easier for me, so that was better [99006] • Subjunctive: When I said "están contentos que hayan..." I remembered that you have to use subjuntivo for some kind of opinion or emotion [I: Did you remember that when you were writing?] Right, yeah, when I was writing it's like I remembered it, so I used it. [99015]

20. What to make of these findings? • The interviews findings challenge a dichotomy between “attention to form” versus “attention to meaning”… • …during meaningful second language production (and when preparing for it) learners engaged in solving form-in-meaning problems

21. In spite of holding a meaning-oriented interpretation of the task (or perhaps more precisely because of it), learners paid attention to form during planning without any specific instructions to do so

22. Focus on FormS (Skehan, VanPatten): Debilitating attention to meaning Focus on Form (Long, Robinson, Doughty): Facilitative attention to form-in-meaning Two articulated positions in TBLL

23. Are they incommensurate? • The two positions may be closer than we typically recognize: VanPatten’s (2002) Input Processing Instruction is crucially based on the assumption that learners will best learn a new form when they are forced to pay attention to certain formal properties while processing it meaningfully… • …May we all be talking, at some basic level, about the same form-in-meaning qualities of optimal language processing and language learning?

24. Conclusion • How well can our ‘form’ and ‘meaning’ metaphors serve us in furthering task-based language learning research? • Moving beyond metaphors and into psycholinguistically and sociocognitively plausible constructs is necessary • Mixed-methods research where data are triangulated can yield findings that help us expand our TBLL/TBLT research programs