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6 Getting a Grip on the Slippery Construct of Awareness: Toward a Finer-Grained Methodological Perspective RONALD P. LEOW, ELLEN JOHNSON, AND GERMÁN ZÁRATE-SÁNDEZ Georgetown University “CONSCIOUSNESS AS AN OBJECT of intellectual curiosity is the philosopher’s joy and the scientist ’s nightmare” (Tulving 1993, 283). No one will disagree with this statement given that the multifaceted nature of the construct “awareness” makes it undoubtedly one of the slipperiest to operationalize and measure in both second language acquisition (SLA) and non-SLA fields such as cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. Indeed, the role of awareness, or lack thereof, in learning is explicitly or implicitly subsumed in a remarkable number of variables in these fields, including type of learning (e.g., subliminal, incidental, implicit, explicit), type of learning condition (e.g., implicit, explicit), type of awareness (e.g., language, metacognitive, phenomenal, situational, self, conscious, unconscious), and constructs such as noticing , detection, perception, and consciousness. This chapter focuses on the methodological issues surrounding the investigation of the relationship between the role of awareness, or lack thereof, and learning. More specifically, the chapter presents a much finer-grained methodological perspective of awareness than what is reported in the current awareness literature in both SLA and non-SLA fields and includes the what (is being learned), the where (awareness is being investigated, concurrently or nonconcurrently), and the how (experimental task, type, and location of measurement are employed to investigate awareness). Given this finer-grained perspective of the role of awareness or lack thereof in learning, the chapter concludes that, methodologically , awareness should be investigated along the stages of the acquisitional process (construction vs. reconstruction) and that several variables need to be considered in any investigation of or report on the construct. Defining What Constitutes Awareness in Learning Early definitions of and references to awareness in fields outside SLA are clear indications of the vagueness of what constitutes awareness. For example, Garrett (1943) wrote, “Awareness is the searchlight of consciousness. It is the process by means of which the individual consciousness as a whole seeks out and finds its as61 sociational affinities everywhere in the universe” (12). In cognitive psychology, Merikle, Smilek, and Eastwood (2001) conflate the terms “awareness” and “consciousness ” when they state that “any evidence that perception is not necessarily accompanied by an awareness of perceiving attracts attention because it challenges the idea that perception implies consciousness” (116). Similarly, in cognitive science, Schacter (1989) uses “consciousness” interchangeably with “phenomenal awareness ” to refer to what Dimond (1976) called “the running span of subjective experience ” (377). In SLA the definition that appears to underlie many of its studies on the role of awareness in learning is Tomlin and Villa’s restricted definition derived from SLA (e.g., Schmidt 1990) and cognitive science (e.g., Schacter 1992). According to Tomlin and Villa (1994), awareness is “a particular state of mind in which an individual has undergone a specific subjective experience of some cognitive content or external stimulus” (193). A careful survey of many studies in SLA and other fields purporting to investigate the role of awareness in learning reveals quite a wide range of methodological approaches employed to investigate this slippery construct. Many studies appear to assume that the role that awareness plays at one stage along the acquisitional process (that is, from input ⬎ intake ⬎ developing L2 grammar ⬎ output) may be reflective of the role played at a different stage along this process. More specifically, awareness may be investigated at the concurrent (online) stage of construction where the encoding or accessing of incoming experimental information takes place and at the nonconcurrent (offline) stage of reconstruction where the retrieval of stored knowledge of the construct (Litman and Reber 2005) occurs. At the stage of construction, learners receive and process online the incoming information while at the stage of reconstruction they indicate offline—after they have processed the incoming information—whether they were aware of the targeted underlying rule, lexical item, color, symbol, and so forth, during the experimental phase or exposure. The stages where awareness plays a role in relation to the acquisitional process in SLA research are visually presented in figure 6.1. 62 Ronald P. Leow, Ellen Johnson, and Germán Zárate-Sández Figure 6.1 The Stages of the Role of Awareness in Relation to the Acquisitional Process in SLA Research Concurrent Nonconcurrent Construction (the encoding and accessing of new information) Reconstruction (the retrieval of stored knowledge) Input...

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