Читать книгу The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics - Carol A. Chapelle - Страница 181

Awareness is defined in SLA as “a particular state of mind in which an individual has undergone a specific subjective experience of some cognitive content or external stimulus” (Tomlin & Villa, 1994, p. 193). Awareness, according to Leow (2001), may be demonstrated through (a) some resulting behavioral or cognitive change, (b) a meta‐report of the experience but without any metalinguistic description of a targeted underlying rule, or (c) a metalinguistic description of a targeted underlying rule. In addition, the operationalization and measurement of what constitutes awareness in SLA is methodologically thorny and varied. Leow, Johnson, and Zárate‐Sández (2011) provide a methodological review of relevant studies in both SLA and non‐SLA fields and call for a finer‐grained approach to the study of the construct of awareness. This finer‐grained approach advocates, in any report on the role of awareness in L2 development, careful consideration of several aspects of the research design that include (a) where awareness is measured (at the stage of encoding/construction that is online, viewed as a process versus at the stage of retrieval/reconstruction that is offline and viewed as a product); (b) what kind of item is being targeted; and (c) how awareness is measured (the measurement instrument).

Studies addressing the role of awareness in L2 development can be categorized into two methodological approaches dependent upon the researcher's perspective of awareness as a process or a product (Leow, 2015b). As a process, that is, during the encoding of L2 data, awareness is measured either concurrently or online via the use of mainly think aloud protocols (e.g., Leow, 2000) or eye‐tracking (e.g., Godfroid & Schmidtke, 2013). As a product, that is, knowledge existing in the learner system, the measurement is offline or non‐concurrent and includes the use of stimulated recalls, offline verbal reports, questionnaires, grammaticality judgment tasks, timed oral and written tests, subjective measures such as confident ratings, source attributions, and so on (e.g., Robinson, 1995b; Leung & Williams, 2011; Rebuschat, Hamrick, Sachs, Riestenberg, & Ziegler, 2015). While the use of online verbal reports has been challenged for the potential reactive nature of this measurement, offline measures run the risk of veridicality or memory decay and raise the methodological issue of whether such operationalization and measurement of the construct awareness does indeed refer “to the same construct, that is, whether the PRODUCT accurately reflects the PROCESS” (Leow & Donatelli, 2017, p. 190, uppercase original).