This study presents SMILLE, a system that draws on the Noticing Hypothesis and on input enhancements, addressing the lack of salience of grammatical information in online documents chosen by a given user. By means of input enhancements, the system can draw the user’s attention to grammar, which could possibly lead to a higher intake per input ratio for metalinguistic information. The system rec...

The input enhancement hypothesis proposed by Sharwood Smith (1991, 1993) has stimulated considerable research over the last 15 years. This article reviews the research on textual enhancement of input (TE), an area where the majority of input enhancement studies have aggregated. Methodological idiosyncrasies are the norm of this body of research. Seven major issues appear to be limiting the gene...

This study examined the capacity of text-based online chat to promote learners’ noticing of their problematic language productions and of the interactional feedback from their interlocutors. In this study, twelve ESL learners formed six mixed-proficiency dyads. The same dyads worked on two spot-thedifference tasks, one via online chat and the other through face-to-face conversation. Stimulated ...

Attentional biases in anxiety disorders have been assessed primarily using three types of experiment: the emotional Stroop task, the probe-detection task, and variations of the visual search task. It is proposed that the inattentional blindness procedure has the ability to overcome limitations of these paradigms in regard to identifying the components of attentional bias. Three experiments exam...

The probability of inattentional blindness, the failure to notice an unexpected object when attention is engaged on some primary task, is influenced by contextual factors like task demands, features of the unexpected object, and the observer's attention set. However, predicting who will notice an unexpected object and who will remain inattentionally blind has proven difficult, and the evidence ...

How can second language teachers retrieve texts that are rich in terms of the grammatical constructions to be taught, but also address the content of interest to the learners? We developed an Information Retrieval system that identifies the 87 grammatical constructions spelled out in the official English language curriculum of schools in Baden-Württemberg (Germany) and reranks the search result...

In the last two decades, Audiovisual Translation (AVT) studies have become of interest for Second Language Acquisition (SLA) researchers, particularly regarding use subtitles in language learning activities. This paper will present an experiment aimed at investigating role subtitled 'input enhancement' SLA. The study involved a group Italian native students English as Foreign (EFL) from Milan U...