Description
Reflections can be in the form of a conventional essay (~500 words, video essay, or infographics) Reflections should identify the main themes of the readings integrated with students’ personal language learning and/or teaching experience. Reflections should not merely summarize the readings. They should include personal thoughts, experience, reactions and analysis. Students may find ideas in readings that contradict or reinforce their existing beliefs and teaching practice. While the first person singular pronoun “I” is appropriate in this genre, an academic tone should be maintained. If students choose to reflect on a singular idea/theory in the readings, the reflection should demonstrate that they have read and understood all of the reading materials by, for instance, clearly showing the connection between this idea/theory with other theories. An appropriate title for the reflection can be chosen.
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SSLA, 24, 541–577. Printed in the United States of America.
DOI: 10.1017.S0272263102004023
OUTPUT, INPUT ENHANCEMENT,
AND THE NOTICING HYPOTHESIS
An Experimental Study
on ESL Relativization
Shinichi Izumi
Sophia University
This study investigates the potentially facilitative effects of internal
and external attention-drawing devices—output and visual input enhancement—on the acquisition of English relativization by adult English as a second language (ESL) learners. Specifically, the study
addresses: (a) whether the act of producing output promotes noticing of formal elements in the target language (TL) input and affects
subsequent learning of the form; and (b) whether such outputinduced noticing and learning, if any, would be the same as that
effected by visual input enhancement designed to draw learners’ attention to problematic form features in the input. These questions
were examined in a controlled experimental study in which the requirements of output and exposure to enhanced input were systematically varied. A computer-assisted reconstruction and reading task
was used as the vehicle of presentation of the target input materials.
The major findings are: (a) Those engaged in output-input activities
outperformed those exposed to the same input for the sole purpose
of comprehension in learning gains; (b) those who received visual
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for
Applied Linguistics held in St. Louis, MO, in February of 2001. This paper is based on part of the
author’s doctoral dissertation, which was completed at Georgetown University. I am thankful to
Catherine Doughty for her guidance throughout the entire process of my research project. My thanks
also go to Jeff Connor-Linton and Cristina Sanz for their critical comments and encouragement.
Thanks are also due to a number of people who were directly or indirectly involved in this research
project, including the directors, teachers, and students of the participating ESL programs as well as
people who were kindly involved in the creation, execution, and assessment of the tests and tasks
used in the study. Finally, I wish to thank the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments
and insights.
Address correspondence to: Shinichi Izumi, Department of English Language and Studies, Sophia
University, 7-1 Kioi-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-8554, Japan; e-mail: [email protected].
2002 Cambridge University Press 0272-2631/02 $9.50
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Shinichi Izumi
input enhancement failed to show measurable gains in learning, despite the documented positive impact of enhancement on the noticing of the target form items in the input; and (c) in view of the above,
no support was found for the hypothesis that the effect of input enhancement was comparable to that of output. The subsequent discussion centers on reexamining the construct of noticing and argues
for the need to consider levels and types of processing in order to
account for how sensory detection can lead to learning.
For many second language (L2) learners and teachers, producing language
(i.e., output) is generally considered to constitute an important part of L2
learning. However, precisely how beneficial it is to produce language is often
not so clear. If the question is considered in terms of the contribution of output to the development of L2 knowledge as opposed to its utility in increasing
fluency, the answer may become even more vague and speculative. Moreover,
if output has any positive effect on learning, we may wish to ask whether it is
unique to output or if essentially the same effect can be obtained by some
external manipulation of input. These are the issues that are addressed in the
study reported on in this article.
ATTENTION AND NOTICING IN SLA
The global consensus that has emerged from decades of research in SLA is
that input plays a crucial role in driving learners’ acquisition of an L2. Current
SLA research, however, goes beyond general interest in the need for comprehensible input (Krashen, 1985), which is considered necessary but insufficient
(see Ellis, 1994; Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991; and Long, 1996, for reviews).
Instead, it seeks to obtain a more precise understanding of how learners process, or interact with, input to develop their interlanguage (IL) competence.
Given that not all of the input that learners are exposed to is utilized as intake
for learning, recent research in cognitive psychology and SLA has examined
the role of attention in mediating input and learning. A general finding of such
research indicates that attention is necessary for learning to take place (see
Robinson, 1995; Schmidt, 1990, 1995, 2001; and Tomlin & Villa, 1994, for reviews; see also Schachter, 1998; and Truscott, 1998, for skeptical views). Simply stated, “people learn about the things that they attend to and do not learn
much about the things they do not attend to” (Schmidt, 2001, p. 30).
This general agreement on the importance of attention notwithstanding,
disagreement exists as to the amount and type of attention needed for learning. Three positions have been put forth in the SLA literature. First, the Noticing Hypothesis (Schmidt, 1990, 1995, 2001; Schmidt & Frota, 1986) claims that
“intake is that part of the input that the learner notices” (1990, p. 139). Noticing, Schmidt argued, crucially requires focal attention and awareness on the
Effects of Output and Input Enhancement
543
part of the learner. A second position, proposed by Tomlin and Villa (1994),
claims that, of three interrelated processes of attention—alertness, orientation, and detection—only detection, which does not require conscious awareness, is crucial for learning; the other two processes may help to increase the
chance of detection and, thus, learning. Third, Robinson (1995) defined
Schmidt’s noticing as what is both detected and then further activated as a
result of the allocation of attentional resources from a central executive. He
argued that different task demands stimulate different types of further cognitive processing.
Pedagogical Attempts to Promote Learners’ Noticing of Form
Taking the central role of attention in learning as a starting point of investigation, recent SLA research has begun to explore whether and how the learners’
attentional processes may be influenced for the sake of their greater IL development. Such consideration is indeed at the core of influential pedagogic proposals known as consciousness-raising or input enhancement (Rutherford &
Sharwood Smith, 1985; Sharwood Smith, 1993) and focus on form (Doughty,
2001; Doughty & Williams, 1998; Long, 1991; Long & Robinson, 1998).
Two specific pedagogical approaches to draw the learner’s attention to
form have received considerable attention in recent SLA research. One is
known as visual (textual or typographical) input enhancement, and the other
is learners’ output. These approaches share a basic characteristic—namely,
an attempt to direct the learner’s otherwise elusive attention to problematic
aspects in the input to promote their acquisition. They differ, however, in how
this is achieved. Whereas attention in the case of visual input enhancement is
induced by external means (i.e., by highlighting selected input forms), attention in output arises internally through production processes, in that learners
themselves decide what they find problematic in their production and what
they pay attention to in the input (although external manipulation of task variables may intervene in this process). In other words, it may be argued that
visual input enhancement is an external attention-drawing technique, whereas
output is an internal attention-drawing device. Previous studies on these two
approaches will be examined in turn.
Visual Input Enhancement: Previous Studies and Remaining Issues
Visual input enhancement is an implicit and unobtrusive means to draw the
learners’ attention to form contained in the written input (Doughty & Williams,
1998). The basic method of the enhancement is simply increasing the perceptual salience of the target form via combinations of various formatting techniques (e.g., bolding, capitalizing, or underlining), which may sometimes be
accompanied by an explicit mention to the learners to attend to the highlighted form. With a particular form chosen for the target, the enhancement
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embedded in the overall reading lesson aims to achieve the integration of attention to form and attention to meaning.
Previous studies on the effects of visual input enhancement—both those
that used short-term treatment with rather limited exposure to the input (Alanen, 1995; Jourdenais, Ota, Stauffer, Boyson, & Doughty, 1995; Leow, 1997;
Robinson, 1997; Shook, 1994; Williams, 1999) and those that used longer-term
treatment with a greater amount of input exposure (Doughty, 1988, 1991; Jourdenais, 1998; White, 1998)—produced quite mixed results. Four of these nine
studies (Doughty; Jourdenais et al.; Shook; and Williams) yielded positive findings for the facilitative effect of the enhancement, whereas three studies (Alanen; Robinson; and White) showed only limited effects and two (Leow;
Jourdenais) found no significant effect at all. Although various differences in
these studies make direct comparison among them difficult, an examination of
several factors—of which I focus on three—is instrumental in identifying the
directions for future research on the issue (for a detailed review of these studies, see Izumi, 2000).
First, although clearly a desirable design feature, not all studies incorporated the noticing assessment component in their research designs. Studies
that did use some kind of noticing measure provided interesting evidence as
to the degree and nature of noticing. For example, Alanen’s (1995) study suggested that noticing seems to be an important factor in accounting for subsequent learning, but the cross-comparison of the noticing results and learning
outcomes suggests that noticing seemed to be induced by a variety of factors,
not the least of which was input enhancement. White (1998), on the other
hand, reported that many learners noticed the forms but were not sure of
their relevance or importance, which arguably accounted for the limited improvement by the enhancement group in her study. Given the alleged importance of attention in learning that is presupposed by most studies, and given
the uncertainty regarding the link between input enhancement, noticing, and
learning, the employment of a noticing measure, or better yet, multiple measures of noticing, seems critical in future studies.
Second, previous research has raised questions about whether input enhancement alone can really induce desired learning effects as intended by the
researcher. In this vein, Williams’s (1999) study, which showed the benefits of
visual enhancement, used a form-focused verbatim recall task in conjunction
with visual input enhancement. Such tasks may have served as a focused output task, inducing greater noticing of the form than may have been possible
by visual enhancement alone. Likewise, Doughty (1988, 1991) found positive
effects of the meaning-oriented treatment that involved not only visual enhancement but also various forms of comprehension assistance given for each
single sentence. As such, her meaning-oriented treatment may be construed
to be more explicit, elaborated, and focused than a simple enhancement condition. Thus, it seems that further investigation into the effects of a combination of instructional techniques may be worthwhile.
Finally, for any research on the effects of intervention treatment on L2
Effects of Output and Input Enhancement
545
learning, it is useful to examine a priori the learner’s level of proficiency, or
more specifically the developmental level vis-à-vis the target form, because it
is quite possible that the treatment effect is constrained by the learner’s developmental readiness (Pienemann, 1984, 1998). Among the nine studies reviewed here, only Doughty (1988, 1991; and perhaps White, 1998) assessed the
learnability of the target form for the selected group of learners prior to the
start of the treatment. A general lack of learnability considerations in many of
the studies is partly due perhaps to the inherent difficulty involved in determining the learnability of forms (but see Pienemann’s, 1998, processability
theory) and partly due to the debate surrounding how rigidly the learnability
notion can and should be applied in SLA classroom studies and pedagogical
practices (see, e.g., Spada & Lightbown, 1999). Such debate notwithstanding,
more studies taking the learnability notion into account would be desirable if
we are to be sure that the learners are indeed psycholinguistically capable of
learning the targeted form.
The present study takes these considerations into account and investigates
the effects of visual input enhancement on the noticing and acquisition of a
grammatical form by adult L2 learners. Another independent variable to be
investigated is learner output. The inclusion of these two variables permits
the investigation of how they may interact or contrast in promoting SLA.
The Role of Output in SLA
The currently popular view of output posits that it constitutes not just the
product of acquisition or the means by which to practice one’s language for
greater fluency but also a potentially important causal factor in the acquisition process. In general, the importance of output in learning may be
construed in terms of the learners’ active deployment of their cognitive resources. In other words, it is posited that the output requirement presents
learners with unique opportunities to process language that may not be decisively necessary for simple comprehension. In proposing the Output Hypothesis, Swain (1985) argued that producing the target language (TL) may serve as
“the trigger that forces the learner to pay attention to the means of expression
needed in order to successfully convey his or her own intended meaning” (p.
249). In psycholinguistic terms, it may be assumed that grammatical encoding
and monitoring mechanisms (see Levelt, 1989) play particularly important
roles for learning purposes by functioning as an internal priming device for
grammatical consciousness-raising for the language learner (see Izumi, 2000,
for a detailed discussion of the psycholinguistic rationale of the Output Hypothesis).
Of the four functions of output specified in the current version of the Output Hypothesis (Swain, 1993, 1995, 1998), the present study focuses on its noticing function. The noticing function of output posits that learners may notice
the gap in their IL knowledge in an attempt to produce the TL, which then
prompts them to solve their linguistic deficiency in ways that are appropriate
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in a given context. For example, if learners are left on their own to solve the
immediate production difficulties, they may engage in various thought processes that can consolidate existing knowledge or possibly generate some
new knowledge on the basis of their current knowledge (Swain & Lapkin,
1995). On the other hand, if relevant input is immediately available, the heightened sense of problematicity during production may cause the learners to
process subsequent input with more focused attention; they may try to examine closely how the TL expresses the intention that they just had difficulty in
expressing on their own. In either case, learning is believed to be enhanced
through the act of producing language, which, by its mechanisms, increases
the likelihood that learners become sensitive to what they can and cannot say
in the TL, which leads to the reappraisal of their IL capabilities.
Previous empirical studies on the noticing function of output have produced mixed findings. In a series of studies (Izumi & Bigelow, 2000; Izumi, Bigelow, Fujiwara, & Fearnow, 1999), my colleagues and I investigated whether
output would indeed alter the learners’ subsequent input processing and promote their IL development. Focusing on the English past hypothetical conditional, these studies compared a group that was given output opportunities
and subsequent exposure to relevant input and a group that received the
same input for the sole purpose of comprehension. This basic format of the
treatment was instantiated in two types of tasks—a text-reconstruction task
and a guided essay-writing task—that were delivered in reverse orders in the
two studies. The results of both studies indicated a significant improvement
on the form only after the second phase of the treatment (i.e., both types of
tasks), which suggested the importance of extended opportunities to produce
output and receive input in effecting substantial learning.
In terms of task effects, both studies found that the essay-writing task was
more susceptible to individual variation than was the text-reconstruction task.
It seems that the greater freedom in production in the essay-writing task
makes the IL output–TL input comparison difficult vis-à-vis the target grammatical form, leading different learners to attend to vastly different aspects of
the input. On the other hand, the reconstruction task may have an advantage
in promoting noticing the gap when a specific form is targeted, as these tasks
maximize the similarities between the learner’s production and the TL model.
In general, however, output opportunities in these studies had variable effects
on noticing and learning of the form for different learners, which resulted in
blurring the overall between-group advantage of the output group. One proposed explanation for this result is that presenting a text-length passage to
read all at once may have been exceedingly taxing on the attentional capacities of some subjects and made attending to form difficult. Another proposed
explanation, which finds some support in the IL analysis by Izumi and Bigelow
(2000), is that the target form in these studies may not be particularly noticeable through the process of output followed by relevant input. It was suggested that a combination of formal complexity and functional expendability
of the form might have contributed to this result.
Effects of Output and Input Enhancement
547
Four implications may be drawn from these studies for future research.
First, it would be important to provide learners with extended opportunities
to produce output and receive relevant input to ensure maximal benefit from
the output-input treatment. Second, for output to promote noticing and learning of a specific form, relevant task characteristics need to be considered
carefully. Also of interest in this regard is how output may be combined with
other focus-on-form techniques to promote greater learning. Third, care needs
to be taken to make sure that the learners’ processing capacity is not overloaded during output and input processing to allow for adequate allocation of
attentional resources to forms. Finally, the effects of output need to be investigated with other linguistic forms. The present study takes these points into
account and aims to further our understanding of the input-output relationships. Specifically, building on earlier studies, the present study examines
whether output and (visual) input enhancement, in isolation or in combination, promote noticing and learning of an L2 grammatical form.
STUDY METHODOLOGY
Target Form
The target form in this study, English relative clauses (RCs), was chosen for
several reasons. Most generally, the acquisition of RCs in English has been
studied extensively by a number of researchers working on both first language
(L1) acquisition and SLA (see Doughty, 1988, 1991, and Izumi, 2000, for reviews of relevant studies). These studies provide a rich source of information
as to the structures of English RCs, the natural developmental sequence of
acquisition of these forms, the potential facilitative role of instructional intervention on them, and processing problems that both L1 and L2 learners face
in producing and comprehending them.
More specifically, the typological markedness relationship that holds
among different relativization types and the putative existence of natural developmental sequences of RC acquisition generate three implications that are
important for determining the sequencing, timing, and assessing of the instructional treatment. For sequencing, knowledge of the developmental sequences and the markedness relationship allows for an informed decision on
which structure, among many relativization types available in English, should
be targeted for instruction. For timing, knowledge of the developmental sequences enables us to give careful consideration to the learnability of the
form for particular groups of learners. For assessment, the markedness relationship informs us of how to assess the extent of learning caused by the instructional intervention (i.e., the degree of the generalizability of the
acquisition of the targeted form to other related structures in the implicational relationship). As in Doughty’s (1988, 1991) studies, the instruction of
the present study focused on the object-of-preposition (OPREP) type of RCs.
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Table 1. Four treatment groups included
in the study
Output
Input enhancement
Required
Not required
Enhanced
Unenhanced
+O+IE
+O–IE
–O+IE
–O–IE
Research Design
The study was a controlled experimental study with a pretest–posttest design,
involving four treatment groups and one control group (see Table 1). The
treatment groups differed with respect to output requirements (notated as
±O) and exposure to enhanced input (notated as ±IE) such that: The +O–IE
group was required to produce output and was exposed to regular, unenhanced input; the +O+IE group was required to produce output and received
enhanced input; the –O+IE group received enhanced input without output;
and –O–IE group received unenhanced input without any output requirement.
The control group participated only in the pre- and posttests.
Dependent variables of the study included the noticing measures, which
were used to address the extent of noticing induced by output and input enhancement, and acquisition measures, which were used to address the extent
of learning brought about by the respective treatments. As will be subsequently described, two types of noticing measures were used: note scores derived from notetaking done by the subjects during the input exposure phases
of the treatment, and immediate uptake of the form demonstrated in the subjects’ production during the output phases of the treatment.1 Thus, the factors
included in the study were: (a) two between-groups factors—the output condition with two levels (+O and –O) and the input enhancement condition with
two levels (+IE and –IE); (b) time as a within-group factor with two levels—a
pretest and a posttest; and (c) two dependent measures—noticing and acquisition.
Research Hypotheses
The research hypotheses were based on the consideration of the results of
the prior theoretical and empirical research previously discussed. Hypotheses
1 and 2 are concerned with the noticing issue in relation to output and input
enhancement, respectively. Hypothesis 3 was formulated on the basis of the
assumption that the learners’ noticing would be greater if the two attentiondrawing techniques are combined than when they are used separately.
Hypothesis 1: The noticing of the target form in the input would be greater for the
output subjects than for the nonoutput subjects.
Effects of Output and Input Enhancement
549
Hypothesis 2: The noticing of the target form in the input would be greater for subjects receiving enhanced input than for those receiving unenhanced input.
Hypothesis 3: The noticing of the target form in the input would be greater for +O+IE
subjects than for +O–IE subjects and –O+IE subjects.
The fourth through sixth hypotheses are concerned with the acquisition
issue. If, as Schmidt (1990, 1995, 2001) claimed, noticing of the form is required for learning that form, it should follow that greater noticing of the target form induced via output, input enhancement, or a combination of both,
should lead to increased learning of the form.
Hypothesis 4: Output subjects would demonstrate greater learning of the target form
than would nonoutput subjects.
Hypothesis 5: Subjects receiving enhanced input would demonstrate greater learning
of the target form than would subjects receiving unenhanced input.
Hypothesis 6: +O+IE subjects would demonstrate greater learning of the target form
than +O–IE subjects and –O+IE subjects.
Hypothesis 7 is postulated based on the logical inference that, if the underlying variable for the treatments is the focused attention given to the formal
features in the input (i.e., noticing), how it is induced—via output or input
enhancement—should make little difference in the learning outcomes as long
as noticing is somehow induced.
Hypothesis 7: By virtue of their attention-drawing effects, the two conditions of +O–IE
and –O+IE would produce a comparable amount of noticing and learning.
Subjects
Subjects were recruited from among students enrolled in the ESL programs at
two major U.S. universities that were similar in both their programs and their
enrolled ESL student population. The selection of the subjects was determined
on the basis of a test of English relativization administered to intermediatelevel classes at the two institutions. This screening test also served as the pretest for the participating subjects. Following Doughty (1988, 1991), the present
study chose subjects who demonstrated emerging knowledge of relativization
but who had yet to acquire it beyond the initial subject relativization phase.
Specifically, students who demonstrated ample knowledge of the target structure or who failed to show any sign of knowledge of grammatical embedding
necessary for relativization were eliminated from the subject pool at this
point. An arbitrary cutoff score of 80% on the total pretest score was set to
exclude subjects from the former category. Students were determined to have
had at least rudimentary knowledge of relativization if they (a) produced targetlike subject RCs at least once in the production tests, (b) produced other
types of RCs (i.e., direct object or OPREP types) in a targetlike way or in an IL
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form (mostly with pronoun copies), or (c) responded to the items on the subject RC in the reception tests at better than chance scores.
Out of 110 students who took the pretest, 77 satisfied the learnability requirements. Of these, 47 agreed to participate in the study and completed all
the treatments and the posttest. Fourteen randomly selected students who
satisfied the above requirements served as the control group and participated
only in the pre- and posttests. Thus, including the control group, the number
of the final pool of subjects was 61. To ensure pretreatment equivalence of the
subjects in their knowledge of English relativization, subjects were assigned to
different groups using a stratified random assignment procedure and the pretest results as the basis of stratification. This resulted in the following grouping: 11 for the +O+IE group; 12 each for the +O–IE, –O+IE, and –O–IE groups;
and 14 for the control group. To summarize the subject information for all
groups combined, the subjects’ L1s included Arabic (24), Chinese (6), French
(2), Japanese (3), Kazah (1), Korean (11), Persian (1), Polish (1), Portuguese
(1), Spanish (6), Thai (4), and Turkish (1). There were 34 males and 27 females. The subjects’ mean age was 26.2 years (SD = 8.22). Their mean length
of residence in the United States was 6.3 months (SD = 6.17). Almost all subjects had completed their high school education prior to coming to the United
States. The mean length of English instruction was 6.6 years (SD = 3.6). All of
these factors were divided roughly equally in each group.
Experimental Schedule
The experimental schedule of the study is as follows. First, the researcher visited each class and administered the pretest. The test was subsequently
scored for initial screening. The mean interval length between the pretest and
the commencement of the treatment for the subjects was 7.13 days. The treatment, conducted in the written mode, consisted of six sessions and took place
over a 2-week period. During this period, subjects were requested to come to
the computer laboratory outside of class hours and complete the “lesson of
the day.” The researcher, present at the lab throughout the treatment, supervised and assisted subjects with procedural matters. After signing a consent
form and filling out a background questionnaire, subjects engaged in a practice session, the purpose of which was to familiarize them with the activities
that were done mainly on the computer and with production work done using
paper and pencil. Subjects were not told that this first session was a practice
session. The target sessions started with the second session. The topics of all
texts were related to relationships and marriage. In the few cases in which
subjects could not come to the session on six different days, they were allowed to complete two sessions in one day. After the treatment period, the
researcher visited the students’ classes once again and administered the posttest. The mean interval length between the last day of the treatment and the
posttest administration was 3.43 days. After the posttest was completed, all
the treatment subjects filled out a posttreatment questionnaire.
Effects of Output and Input Enhancement
551
In an attempt to control for the outside exposure to the target form, the
teachers of the participating classes were requested not to teach RCs and not
to answer any questions about RCs from their students during the experimental period; all teachers accepted and followed this request. Subjects were
asked not to discuss the treatment activities with other people. As a further
check, a posttreatment questionnaire probed whether any subjects consulted
with anyone or anything about the treatment activities and whom or what
they consulted if they did. The analysis of the questionnaire data and the corresponding analyses of the test scores did not reveal any obvious differences
in the subjects’ performance in this regard (see Izumi, 2000, for details).
Treatment
Although it is assumed that L2 learners are equipped with psycholinguistic
mechanisms that underlie the Output Hypothesis (e.g., grammatical encoding,
monitoring, noticing mismatches; see Izumi, 2000), the earlier discussion suggested that not all production circumstances provide ideal grounds on which
to promote sensitization to language forms. In particular, the capacity limitations of human attentional resources are likely to affect the efficiency of the
encoding and monitoring processes in production.2 Such effects, moreover,
are likely to be more pronounced for language learners than for mature L1
users, owing to the greater need of the former group to exercise controlled
processing that requires attentional control (Kormos, 1999). Precisely because
of the limited and selective nature of attention and the availability of an escape hatch from focus on form in the production process, it is important to
ask not only whether output can enhance learning in general terms but also
under what conditions it contributes to language learning. The treatment
tasks described in the following subsections aimed to create an optimal condition for language learning.
Text Reconstruction Task: Rationale for Use and Major Design Features.
The task used in this study was a modified version of a text-reconstruction
task used in previous studies (Izumi & Bigelow, 2000; Izumi et al., 1999). Several reasons underlie this decision. First, a reconstruction task by its very nature has the potential for promoting comparisons between the IL output and
the TL input. It is essentially a meaning-based pedagogical activity that allows
learners to devote some attentional resources to form and that provides both
the data and the incentive for the learners to make IL–TL comparisons
(Thornbury, 1997). It is, in a sense, a unique “linguistic problem-solving task”
(Brett, 1994, p. 332). These are important features of the task in light of the
notions of focus on form, in which integration of form and meaning is emphasized. More specifically, one advantage of the reconstruction task lies in its
control over the content and form that learners produce. Maximizing the
equivalence between the learners’ output and the target input should promote
direct comparisons between their IL-output and the
