Practices of incidental and intentional foreign-language learning This presentation will begin with a brief review of the concepts of incidental and intentional learning as used in psychology and foreign language pedagogy. This talk will give an overview of psychological theories of automaticity and automatization and assess their applicability to second language acquisition processes. While protocol analysis has been used for quite some time in the field of cognitive psychology in order to investigate learners' problem-solving skills, it is only more recently that second language researchers have begun to use the method to look at cognitive processes utilized in second language acquisition. This paper will discuss the use of protocol analysis to examine cognitive processes involved in second language learning, including observation of what learners attend to in their linguistic input, analysis of linguistic task demands, examination of learners' attention to their linguistic output, and observation of cognitive strategies employed by language learners. Competence develops primarily through attention to input and the initiation of strategies such as rehearsal, analysis and hypothesis testing.
Performance depends upon storage and access, both of which crucially involve attention.
Theoretical ssues to be dealt with include active vs. passive attention, attention to external stimuli vs. internal representations, early vs. late selection theories, central capacity models vs. modular models of attention, the possibility of nonattentional learning, and links between attention and memory. Toward an understanding of language aptitude and its role in instructional design Among the multitude of individual differences that characterize second language learners, language aptitude has consistently been the best predictor of language learning success. Cognitive underpinnings of focus on form This paper discusses ten cognitive constructs underlying the pedagogical intervention known as focus on form. Sentence processing research is a major enterprise in psycholinguistics and cognitive science, yet little work has been done in the area of L2 sentence processing. The two approaches are compared and the contribution this research can make to a transition theory of SLA is discussed.