What is 'learned attention'?

The second language acquisition and cognitive science literature are full of jargon to explain language learning phenomena. This can be off-putting to teachers who do not often read research. Sometimes you may even get the impression that terms are invented to describe pretty obvious things which don't need jargon - I'm tempted to include terms like the retrieval practice effect, comprehensible input and the Noticing Hypothesis!

Now, learned attention is a term from the literature which is worth explaining, but which describes a phenomenon many language teachers will have thought of and encountered in the classroom. Below is a section from the second edition of The Language Teacher Toolkit (2nd edition) which is due to be published in the early summer. The section comes from Chapter 6 which is about teaching grammar. (L1 = first language, L2 = additional/new language.)

‘Learned attention’

We acquire grammatical patterns by hearing and seeing them in input, but what we pay attention to is partly dictated by what we already know about our L1 and what we think is significant. This means we do not pay equal attention to every grammatical feature – this is what is called learned attention (N. Ellis, 2012).

For instance, English speakers learning Spanish may not notice Spanish masculine or feminine endings of nouns and adjectives in the input, because the notion of grammatical gender does not exist in English. Similarly, English learners of French may not notice that a French verb is in the simple future because in English the simple future is cued by the word ‘will’ whereas in French it is indicated by an inflectional change to the verb ending. For English learners of German, the issue is even more complex owing to word order and cases. This blindness to grammatical features is called blocking (N.Ellis, 2012). An implication of this is that it is not enough just to provide input, we have to make sure we get students to focus on the features they may ignore. Ways to make grammatical features more salient (noticeable) include:

• Enhancing written text through colour, bold fonts or underlining, e.g. adjectives, articles or verb endings.
• Exaggerating the sound of important morphemes such as verb endings, e.g. the sound of the past participle in French.
• Making facial expressions when pronouncing certain morphemes.
• Using explanation and translation to highlight the difference between L1 and L2.
• Using the ‘dodgy translation’ technique, e.g. translating German Ich bin gegangen as ‘I am gone’, rather than ‘I have gone’ to remind students that the verb gehen takes the auxiliary sein in the perfect tense.
• Using form-focused exercises such as: ‘Choose the right ending’, ‘Listen and correct’ and ‘Spot the silent endings’. 

In sum, to enable students to see and hear L2 features blocked by learned attention, grammar teaching is partly about redirecting students’ attention when they read and listen to L2 input, by training them day in day out to focus their eyes and ears on parts of the L2 words and sentences they would not normally see or hear because of their L1 processing habits. 

For the research chapter and verse, here is a link to a freely available book chapter by Nick Ellis.