Learning Without Awareness Revisited

Abstract

The role of awareness or consciousness in learning has been a relatively contentious issue in non-SLA fields (e.g., cognitive psychology). With the publications of Williams (2004, 2005), a similar debate appears to be brewing in the field of SLA. Contrary to Leow (2000), who reported that unawareness did not appear to play an important role in second or foreign language development, Williams (2005) offered empirical evidence that learning without awareness appears to be feasible. At the same time, it is also noted that Leow’s and Williams’s (2005) research designs measured unawareness at different stages (online encoding and offline retrieval, respectively) of the acquisitional process. The present study revisited and extended Williams’s (2005) study by using a hybrid design to gather concurrent data at the stage of encoding and during the testing phase as well as nonconcurrent data after the experimental exposure. Some methodological changes were also implemented to probe deeper into learners’ thought processes. The quantitative analyses performed on the data of 34 carefully screened participants revealed that, at the encoding stage, unaware learners do not appear capable of selecting or producing the correct determiner-noun combination when required to do so from options that include both animacy and distance information. The qualitative data underscore the importance of not only situating the measurement of the construct (un)awareness from different stages—that is, both online and offline—but also triangulating data from several sources in any report on its role in learning. Plausible explanations for the differences in findings are discussed.

Sleep facilitates learning a new linguistic rule

“…This result suggests that adults can make form-meaning connections in the absence of awareness. However, this finding has been difficult to replicate (Hama & Leow, 2010; Stutenberg & Morgan-Short, 2011), suggesting that implicit second language learning may occur at only a weak level and/or that there may be considerable variability in this ability among different participants. Nonetheless, later studies have found additional evidence for implicit second language learning in adults using reaction-time methodology, which may be more sensitive to implicit learning than a forced-choice decision task.…”

Chapter 2. Attention, awareness, and individual differences in language learning

“…Other subjects seem to remain completely unaware of the conditioning factor but still exhibited a small but statistically significant animacy bias in their responses. Even though it cannot be conclusively claimed that these subjects had no awareness whatsoever at the point of learning, and although both an earlier experiment by Williams (2004) and a recent replication study by Hama and Leow (2010) failed to find evidence of learning without awareness, Williams' findings are interesting and intriguing, suggesting that "implicit learning of form-meaning connections is possible, at least in principle" (2004, p. 298). Williams' finding that implicit learning in these experiments was correlated with participants' prior knowledge of languages with grammatical gender is equally intriguing, suggesting that prior experience in language learning may play a role in implicit learning.…”

Methodological considerations in studying awareness during learning. Part 2: Second Language Acquisition

“…In the SLA literature, driven by the wellknown acquisition-learning distinction made by Krashen (1981Krashen ( ,1985Krashen ( , 1994Krashen ( , 2003, the possibility of SLA without awareness has been disputed (DeKeyser, 2003;Dornyei, 2009;Ellis, 1994Ellis, , 2007Hulstijn & Schmidt, 1994;Robinson, 1995aRobinson, , 2003Robinson, , 2007Robinson et al, 2011;Schmidt, 1995b;Williams, 2009) and empirically examined (N. DeKeyser, 1995;Hama & Leow, 2010;Hulstijn & DeKeyser, 1997;Hulstijn & R. Ellis, 2005;Robinson 1996Robinson , 1997bRosa & Leow, 2004;Williams, 2005Williams, , 2010, to name just a few).…”

“…When the thinkaloud protocol itself produces learning effects, this is called positive reactivity while when it interferes with ongoing learning processes, this is called negative reactivity. In the implicit SLA literature, some studies employed the thinkaloud protocol as an alternative measure of awareness to the verbal report (Hama & Leow 2010;Rosa & O'Neill 1999;Rosa & Leow 2004). O'Neill (1999, see also Rosa & investigated the roles of explicit grammar explanation and explicit instruction to search for rules underlying training stimuli in learning Spanish contrary-to-the fact conditionals in the past.…”

“…Hamma and Leow (2010) extended Williams (2005) to include the online think-aloud protocol as a measure of awareness. The think-aloud protocol was inserted into both training and test phases and three levels of awareness were distinguished, as in Rosa and O'Neill (1999) Ne birds because ne represents living thing.…”