Attention, awareness, and accents in L2 French

Abstract

The present research applies the concepts of attention, awareness, and noticing to a previously unresolved strand of inquiry: accent marks in L2 (second language) French. Previous research found that learners who typed accented words had better recall of the accent marks than those who wrote the same words by hand. Sturm suggested that it may have been the increased attention to accented letters in the typing group that led to better performance. The typing groups in Gascoigne and Sturm referred to instructions in order to type accented letters, while the handwriting groups copied the items with pen and paper. The present study was designed to make the handwriting group more aware of the accented letters. Participants, grouped by class section, practised the target items either by writing by hand, with accented letters in a different colour ink, or typing the accented letters using alt+numeric codes. They completed recognition and dictation post-tests, immediately following and one week after treatment. Two-tailed t-tests show no significant difference between the groups, suggesting that the increased attention to accented letters led to greater accuracy on the post-test tasks in both conditions.

Keywords:

• attention
• awareness
• foreign language pedagogy
• SLA

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the audience at AAAL 2011 in Chicago for their feedback on this paper, Valerie Wust for her helpful comments on an early draft, and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback. All errors that remain are mine.

Notes

1. Additionally, Schmidt (1990) states that lack of verbal report does not indicate lack of awareness, because certain experiences may be hard to verbalise.

2. Gascoigne-Lally (2000) notes, however, that she did remind handwriting group participants of the importance of accent marks in French.