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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 better 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 learning) 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 incidental 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 + 29 +
