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THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
know that there is an upcoming posttest measuring how much they have
learned from a certain activity. Were they to know that there would be an
upcoming posttest, they might channel their attention to certain linguistic
elements and simply alter their "natural behavior" as they wish to achieve bet¬
ter scores on the upcoming test. This certainly does not happen in the pursuit
of EE activities.
Ellis (2009), with reference to testing, offers a compromise on how these
concepts can be distinguished. He suggests that they should be separated based
on how they can be investigated methodologically, i.e., what methods teachers
or researchers may use when exploiting and measuring these types of learning.
Table 2 provides a visual illustration of the different types.
Table 2. Typical tasks for investigating the four types of learning
Approach Typical task
Incidental | (1) learners are given a task but not told that they will be tested later
learning | (2) they are given a task that focuses their attention on one aspect of the
L2 and, without being warned, tested on some other aspect of the task
(e.g., they are taught a specific grammatical feature and then tested on
whether they have learned a different grammatical feature which they
were exposed to but not taught)
Intentional] (1) learners are given a task and are told that they will be tested afterwards
learning | and then tested on the task as set
Implicit | (1) learners are simply exposed to input data, asked to process it for
learning | meaning and then tested (without warning) to examine what they have
learned (e.g., they are exposed to input that contains plentiful exemplars
of a particular grammatical feature but do not have their attention focused
on this feature)
Explicit | (1) learners are either given an explicit rule relating to a specific feature
learning | which they can apply later in practice activities (deductive explicit learn¬
ing) or
(2) learners are asked to find an explicit rule from the data provided
(inductive explicit learning)
(adapted from Ellis 2009: 264)
Ortega (2009: 94) claims that “it is unanimously agreed in SLA that inci¬
dental learning is possible,” which means that acquiring linguistic elements
from EE activities is possible. Completely implicit learning, however, as it was
pointed out with reference to the Interface Issue, may not occur at all, as a
certain degree of attention is needed for learning to take place. Consequently,
incidental learning is used in the present research project when describing the
kind of learning through which learning through EE may take place. In the
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