Page 199 - Beyond Methods

Activating intuitive heuristics 187
though the term input enhancement is originally used in the L2 lit- erature to refer more to consciousness-raising activities than to noticing the gap activities, for reasons that will become clear I use it here as a cover term to refer to both.
Consciousness-Raising
Put simply, consciousness-raising (C-R) refers to a deliberate attempt to draw the learner’s explicit attention to features of the target lan- guage, particularly to its grammatical features. This may look de- ceptively similar to traditional grammar teaching, but, as Ruther- ford points out, C-R differs from it in fundamental ways. First, C-R “is a means to attainment of grammatical competence . . . whereas ‘grammar teaching’ typically represents an attempt to instill that competence directly” (Rutherford, 1987, p. 24). Second, C-R treats an explicit focus on grammar as necessary but not sufficient for devel- oping grammatical competence whereas traditional grammar teach- ing treats it as necessary and sufficient. Third, C-R acknowledges the learner’s active role in grammar construction; traditional gram- mar teaching considers the learner tabula rasa, a blank slate. Finally, traditional grammar teaching is concerned mainly with syntax, while C-R is concerned with syntax and its relation to semantics, discourse, and pragmatics.
Because the term consciousness does not lend itself to a clear-cut definition, Sharwood Smith (1991) suggested input enhancement in the place of consciousness-raising. The new term correctly shifts the attention from an internal process related to what happens in the mind to an external operation related to input and interaction. According to Rutherford and Sharwood Smith, there are simple ways in which input enhancement can be effected. They include color coding or bold-faced type for selected linguistic features in reading texts, pointing out an error in speech or writing, and asking learners to unscramble sentences of a paragraph and provide their reasons for reordering.
Classroom interactional episode 8.2 discussed above, for instance, illustrates how input can be enhanced through negotiated interac- tion in class. In that episode, what was made salient was not just the grammatical product of cause-effect relationship but the process of grammaticization, that is, the ability to handle form-meaning re- lationship with particular reference to grammatical clauses in En-