Plenary
(in scheduled order)

Plenary I: "The 'noticing hypothesis' twenty years out"
Richard Schmidt (University of Hawai'i at Mānoa) [Friday, October 17th]
SLRF 1988 was the setting for a talk in which I proposed a re-evaluation of the role of subjective experience ("consciousness" in its several manifestations) in second language acquisition, arguing that the leading theories of the day over-emphasized nonconscious learning and had unreasonably dismissed any role for the active human mind in mediating between the linguistic evidence present in the environment and the development of L2 knowledge. The best-known idea to have emerged from this discussion was the "noticing hypothesis," which claimed that input does not become intake for language learning unless it is noticed, that is, consciously registered. A subsequent refinement of the idea stressed the essential role of attention in learning (we learn what we pay attention to, and learn little if anything about things that we do not attend to), and the strongly facilitative role of awareness –admitting the possibility of implicit learning but being skeptical about claims for its ubiquity or efficacy in adult SLA. Since that time, a great deal of research has accumulated that bears on the noticing hypothesis and related issues. In this talk I will review the evidence and consider a variety of empirical and conceptual challenges to these ideas from linguistic, psychological, social, and anti-cognitive perspectives.

Plenary II: "The public and private lives of additional language competence: Implications for a reconceptualized SLA" Alan Firth (Newcastle University) [Saturday, October 18th]
In this presentation I attempt to show that conceptualizing additional language (AL) competence in terms of gradations between ‘public’ and ‘private’ can enhance our conceptual and empirical understanding of AL learning as a situated, contingent and interactionally-achieved accomplishment. By examining various types of orientations and non-orientations to AL competence as observed in a range of social settings - including language learning classrooms, internet chatrooms, radio phone-ins, doctor-patient consultations, and in business encounters conducted in English as a ‘lingua franca’ – I show how contextual phenomena of various kinds (e.g. social identities, activity types, communicative modalities, interactional goals and episodes) are instantiated and made more or less situationally relevant, and how this has an important bearing on how AL competence is managed, thematized, contested, disavowed, and masked. I examine cases where AL users, in a variety of ways, ‘do being learners’, where the nature of AL ‘learnership’ is explicitly as well as implicitly negotiated, and consider cases where AL users do not being AL learners. I argue that in all cases, ‘learning’, of numerous kinds, is ineluctably occurring. The implications of the analyses are considered in terms of our understanding of what AL learning entails, and in light of recent debates on the current status and future of SLA, most particularly the debate covered in Modern Language Journal’s (2007, 91/5) ‘Special Focus Issue’ entitled ‘Reconceptualizing SLA? The impact of Firth & Wagner (1997)’.

Plenary III: "When context matters: Age effects on second language learning"
Carmen Muñoz (Universitat de Barcelona) [Saturday, October 18th]
The discussion on the effects of age on second language acquisition has been dominated by a theoretically-oriented perspective that has traditionally focused on the comparison of learners’ ultimate attainment as a function of their initial age of learning. As a consequence, it may be argued that both concerns and research findings arising from naturalistic learning contexts have been hastily generalized to formal learning contexts.

In this presentation I will analyse the variables that are crucial in the discussion of age effects in second language acquisition, and on the basis of the existing empirical evidence from classroom studies I will argue that the amount and quality of the input that learners receive have a significant bearing on the effects that age has on second language learning.

Finally, it will be claimed that age-related studies in foreign language learning settings have yielded significant findings that are more relevant to decisions concerning the time and timing of second language instruction than findings from naturalistic studies, and that these findings can contribute to the development of an integrated explanation of age effects on second language acquisition.

Plenary IV: "Morphological structure in native and non-native language comprehension"
Harald Clahsen (University of Essex) [Sunday, October 19th]
Recent psycholinguistic research on how non-native (L2) speakers comprehend and process language in real time has led to a substantial number of empirical findings on non-native reading and listening, and some theoretical attempts to explain how and why native and non-native processing differ. Two broad accounts have emerged from this research. One view holds that L1 and L2 processing share the same system and mechanisms but that L2 processing is more demanding in terms of basic cognitive processes (e.g. speed of processing) and affected by the learners’ native language. Alternatively, it has been argued that L1 and L2 processing differ in more fundamental ways, for example, with L2 processing relying more on shallow representations of grammatical structure and on full-form lexical storage than L1 processing. This paper presents results on how advanced adult L2 learners (in comparison to adult native speakers) represent and process morphologically complex words. We used different kinds of experimental tasks (e.g. acceptability ratings, speeded grammaticality judgments, masked priming) to examine the processing of inflectional and derivational phenomena in L2 learners of English and German from typologically different L1 backgrounds. The results from these experiments can only be partially accounted for in terms of cognitive resource limitations or L1 transfer. Instead, we argue that the observed L1/L2 differences support the idea that adult L2 learners are less sensitive to morphological structure than native speakers and rely more on lexical storage than on morphological parsing during processing.

 

 

 

 

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