MODALITY AND ATTENTION TO MEANING AND FORM IN THE INPUT

Abstract

VanPatten (1990) found that L2 learners of Spanish have difficulty simultaneously attending to meaning and form of aural input. This partial replication of VanPatten (1990) addresses the effect of modality on attention to meaning and form by including a written mode and by using a different L2, that is, English as a foreign language. Six tasks were used in this study: (a) listening to the passage for content only, (b) listening for content while attending to the content word inflation, (c) listening for content while attending to the definite article the, (d) reading the passage for content only, (e) reading the passage for content while attending to the content word inflation, and (f) reading for content while attending to the definite article the. Task results in the aural mode mirrored those of VanPatten's original study, but significant differences were not observed for tasks in the written mode. Furthermore, results revealed that listening was more difficult than reading, suggesting that modality is a variable that influences how learners process input. Avenues for future research are discussed.