How do people acquire a second language? Second language acquisition research since the 90s has emphasized that language input and functional language use alone is not sufficient, at least for adult learners (cf., e.g. Lightbown & Spada 2006). Research has emphasized the importance of supporting the awareness of language categories and forms, and input enhancement techniques have been proposed to make the target language features to be learned more salient for the learner.

This provides an interesting opportunity for computational linguistic applications to automatically identify and enhance the relevant language features in texts selected by the learners (Meurers et al. 2010).

But what exactly does it mean to enhance the salience of language features? For which language features is this possible and how is this related to what is known about the mental representation of language? How can one operationalize notions such as awareness and noticing, and how does the idea of input enhancement relate to what is known about implicit and explicit learning?

In this interdisciplinary seminar, we want to explore these questions by connecting research on second language acquisition, computational linguistics, and cognitive psychology.

Course meets: Mondays, 16ct-18 in Hörsaal 1.3, Forum Scientiarum (Doblerstr. 33)

Language: The course language is English, but may be switched to German if desired by all participants.

Nature of course and our expectations: This Hauptseminar/Forschungsseminar intends to provide an overview of the concepts and issues involved in research on input enhancement and awareness in second language acquisition. Students from any of the interdisciplinary areas involved are welcome. No particular background is required, but participants are expected to

Academic conduct and misconduct: Research is driven by discussion and free exchange of ideas, motivations, and perspectives. So you are encouraged to work in groups, discuss, and exchange ideas. At the same time, the foundation of the free exchange of ideas is that everyone is open about where they obtained which information. Concretely, this means you are expected to always make explicit when you’ve worked on something as a team – and keep in mind that being part of a team always means sharing the work.

For text you write, you always have to provide explicit references for any ideas or passages you reuse from somewhere else. Note that this includes text “found” on the web, where you should cite the url of the web site in case no more official publication is available.

References

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