Cognitive Underpinnings of Focus on Form

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine focus on form in cognitive processing terms by postulating plausible, psychologically real, cognitive correlates for a range of L2 learning processes that have become prevalent in the instructed second language acquisition (SLA) literature. Progress in adult SLA is thought often to depend crucially upon cognitive processes such as paying attention to features of target input' noticing interlocutor reactions to interlanguage output' and making insightful comparisons involving differences between input and output utterance details- To be effective' these cognitive comparisons must be carried out under certain conditions of processing meaning, forms, and function, i.e., conditions which promoteprocessingfor language learning. Whereas pedagogically oriented discussions of issues-such as noticing the gap and L2 processing-abound, psycholinguistically motivated rationales for pedagogical recommendations are still rare.