Volume 46, Issue 4

Learning a language in a natural way is normally understood to involve the development of implicit knowledge of that language. The acquisition of such knowledge takes place through communication and is driven by learner-internal mechanisms which cannot be directly influenced by formal instruction. In the case of foreign or second language (L2) learning, the role of instruction is, then, to provide learners with opportunities for communication, and with assistance in those areas in which implicit learning is impossible or inefficient. This article argues that in the case of adult L2 learners the term “natural learning” should be interpreted as referring to explicit learning. This means that adult L2 instruction should primarily aim to engage the learners' problem-solving mechanism by providing them with explicit rules about the target code, and then with opportunities for proceduralizing and automatizing those rules. L2 acquisition is thus treated as the acquisition of a complex skill.

In order to determine the nature of naturalistic learners' difficulty with grammatical gender in a complex morphological system, the longitudinal production data of an early naturalistic L1-Italian and L1-Turkish learner who are acquiring German are examined in light of current theories of gender within Chomsky's (1995) Minimalist Program. After analyzing the speakers' marking on determiners, adjectives and pronouns, we conclude that these learners' errors in the gender of German nouns are the result of at least four factors: inadequate lexical learning, mapping difficulty, processing pressure, and parsing errors that cause the paradigm to be inadequately learned. These factors may be particularly problematic for learners acquiring a system such as the one in German, where gender marking is conflated with case and number on determiners, adjectives and pronouns.

Verbal report protocols have been considered as direct representations of individual cognitive processes. The present study examined the social nature of verbal reports, particularly focusing on whether and in what ways concurrent think-aloud (TA) protocol data are recipient-designed. The results of this study suggest that verbal reports elicited by TA do contain interactive and social features, and that the participants orient to a listener while carrying out the protocol. Treating verbal report protocols as solely cognitive products under represents what they actually reveal. Protocols are socially and interactively constituted, and this fact has to be taken into consideration when analyzing TA data. The strong orientations to the listener observed in this study suggest that a different recipient might evoke different content or types of protocol, just as other social factors could influence the data.

Recent Focus on Form studies have emphasized the importance of learner – rather than teacher – generated attention to formal aspects of interlanguage. In this study, we took advantage of EFL learners' analytical grammar knowledge and designed a post-task approach to foster learners' self-initiated attention. Student dyads transcribed their dialogues cooperatively and then individually reflected on various aspects of their oral production. Learners were found to be able to pay close attention to their mistakes according to their individual learning needs and proficiency levels. Results suggested that, with minimal instructor time, this approach is effective in raising student awareness. The significance of Focus on Form for students in different learning contexts is also discussed.