CARLA Presentation: Attention to Form and Meaning in Second Language Processing: A Conceptual Replication of VanPatten (1990)

VanPatten (1990) reported that when students focus on non-communicative forms, their listening comprehension is less than when they focus on meaning. A series of replication studies have further probed the relationship between attentional focus and comprehension, each seeking to understand if findings hold across modalities (e.g., Greenslade et al., 1999; Leow et al., 2008; Morgan-Short et al., 2018) and languages (e.g., Wong, 2001). Methodological differences, such as text difficulty, learner proficiency level, and comprehension measures, constrain the comparisons and generalizations that can be made (see Sanz & McCormick (2021) for discussion). This study extends this line of inquiry by comparing the comprehension scores of 250 L2 learners of Spanish at three different course levels across two different audio texts and four experimental conditions. Analyses suggest that attending to linguistic form does not uniformly impact comprehension, but rather the impact is mediated by proficiency level and text difficulty. Results are put into dialogue with previous studies.

Presenters:
William Cornejo is a Ph.D. student in Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Minnesota, with a graduate minor in Educational Psychology specializing in quantitative research methods. His work examines sociophonetic variation, family language policy, and second language acquisition of Spanish phonology, informed by extensive experience teaching English and Spanish in El Salvador, and currently focuses on linguistic variation through social network analysis and advanced statistical methods.
Mandy Menke is Associate Professor of Hispanic Linguistics and Director of Language Programs for Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Minnesota. She is a specialist in Spanish language acquisition by both child and adult learners and currently researches teacher learning around critical pedagogies and the impact of critical pedagogies on student learning and language use.