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IMPLICIT LEARNING IN SLA AND THE ISSUE OF INTERNAL VALIDITY

A Response to Leung and Williams’s (2011) “The Implicit Learning of Mappings Between Forms and Contextually Derived Meanings”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 May 2013

Ronald P. Leow  and
Mike Hama
Ronald P. Leow*
Affiliation:
Georgetown University
Mike Hama
Affiliation:
Georgetown University
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Ronald P. Leow, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Georgetown University, Box 571039, Washington, DC 20057-1039. E-mail: leowr@georgetown.edu
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Abstract

There is a growing theoretical, empirical, and methodological debate in the SLA field as to whether unawareness plays a role during attention to or processing of new incoming second language (L2) data. Indeed, studies that have methodologically addressed the construct of unawareness in their research designs offer both empirical support (e.g., Leung & Williams, 2011, 2012; Williams, 2004, 2005) and no empirical support (e.g., Faretta-Stutenberg & Morgan-Short, 2011; Hama & Leow, 2010; Leow, 2000) for implicit learning. This article takes a critical look at one recent study (Leung & Williams, 2011) and questions the level of internal validity with respect to the claim that their study provided empirical evidence of implicit learning. It concludes by providing specific criteria that need to be considered in any study purporting to address the construct of awareness or lack thereof in L2 learning.

Type
Articles
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , September 2013 , pp. 545 - 557
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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