Processing input : an investigation into brazilian efl students

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e ExpressãoBaseados na psicologia e na perspectiva de processamento de input, pesquisadores têm tentado obter informações sobre a relação que existe entre o input e os processos cognitivos dos aprendizes. A principal afirmação dentro dessa perspectiva é que, uma vez que o ser humano não tem uma capacidade ilimitada de atenção, é dificil atender a todo o input ao mesmo tempo. Van Patten (1990) investigou a divisão da atenção do aprendiz entre conteúdo e aspectos formais da língua e verificou que a atenção ao primeiro compete com a atenção ao segundo. O presente estudo teve como objetivo investigar, através da replicação do estudo de Van Patten (1990), se alunos brasileiros de inglês como língua estrangeira apresentavam um desempenho diferente do constatado no experimento original. Os resultados fornecem evidência de que atender ao conteúdo e às formas gramaticais foi mais dificil do que atender somente ao conteúdo ou ao conteúdo e a um item lexical e que somente os alunos em níveis mais avançados puderam atender mais facilmente à forma sem afetar a compreensão do conteúdo. Abstract : Much research in second/ foreign language (L2) acquisition field has been carried out on the way learners process input in an attempt to determine how second/ foreign languages are best learned. Based on cognitive psychology and within an input processing perspective, researchers have been seeking to obtain information about the relationship between input and learners' cognitive processes. The main claim within this perspective is that since humans do not have unlin-úted supplies of attention, it is difficult to attend to everything in the input at the same time. Van Patten (1990) investigated the relationship between learners' attention to the meaning and to the formal features of the language input and found that focusing on meaning competes with focusing on form, and that only when comprehension as a skill is automatized can learners simultaneously attend to form without loss of information. The purpose of the present study was to investigate, through the replication of Van Patten's (1990) study, whether Brazilian EFL students at the secondary school levei perform in different ways when they are asked to attend to both form and meaning in listening tasks. The participants in this study were 71 Brazilian secondary school students enrolled in EFL classes at Colégio de Aplicação, a public high-school linked to the Federal University of Santa Catarina. The experiment followed the same general procederes used by Van Patten. Students at three different levels of competence listened to recorded passages. At each levei students were divided into four different groups and each group was expected to carry out a slightly different task. Thus, in each task learners were expected to pay attention to different things: In Task I, only to the content; in Task II, to the content and to the key lexical item Einstein; in Task III, to the content and to the definite article the, and in Task IV, to the content and to the past verb morpheme -ed. Subjects were to demonstrate their attention to target items by placing an X on their papers every time they heard an occurrence. They were asked to write freely in Portuguese, everything they remembered from the passages and their performance in each task was assessed in terms of the number of idea units recalled. Results provided evidence that attention to content and grammatical forms was more difficult than attention to only content or content plus a lexical item, and only the more advanced learners showed that they could more easily focus on form without affecting comprehension. The results of the present study reinforce Van Patten's claims that learners' attention during input processing is focused first on meaning and that only when comprehension as a skill becomes automatic, learners' are more able to detect grammatical items while detecting information without negatively affecting comprehension