TUNING IN ON PRIME-TIME - CHANNEL EFFECTS IN L2 GRAMMATICALITY JUDGMENT TASKS

Formerly held distinctions which opposed ''conscious'' to ''unconsciou s'' learning, ''controlled'' to ''automatic ''processing, and ''learni ng'' to ''acquisition'' have eroded as tenable models of L2 learning p rocesses. Recent formulations of L2 development instead favor an appro ach which integrates linguistic theory with the information processing models advanced in cognitive psychology. Rather than relying on binar y distinctions, processing-oriented, task-centered research features c ontinua which accommodate the overlapping, interdependent dimensions o f explicit and implicit knowledge, as well as learning with and withou t awareness. In this study, learners performed metalingual and prefere nce tasks requiring them to utilize L2 knowledge brought to mind under one of two conditions: 1) by an aural ''priming'' activity (a listeni ng exercise) designed to tap into memory without recourse to explicit rules, or 2) by a written task (a multiple-choice grammar exercise) ai med specifically at invoking explicit L2 rule. Francophone secondary s tudents of English as a foreign language (N = 169) took a 50-item aura l test involving judgments of well-formed and ill-formed English synta ctic structures, and a parallel written multiple choice test containin g corresponding strings. The ''primed'' group, which took the written test before the aural test, significantly outperformed the ''unprimed' ' group (p less-than-or-equal-to .01), which took the aural test first ; performance levels on the written tests were statistically comparabl e. Two-way ANOVA results indicate important differences between recall with awareness and recall without awareness, strongly suggesting a po sitive role for ''priming'' via the written channel in foreign languag e learning. That is, completion of the written task prior to the liste ning task appeared to enhance learners' performance significantly on t he latter possibly because of the explicit character of the former.