K: Finally, I made up my mind about how to work with phrasal verbs. Actually
I have already started. You know, I listen to my teachers’ lectures (on
Phonetics, Discourse Analysis, Psycholinguistics, etc). I tried to understand
what they say (actually that’s what I am there for), but at the same time I concentrate
on their use of phrasal verbs. I’ve noticed that they basically use the same verbs.
This way, I have everything, the examples used in different contexts! I write them
down and then try to use them in my tandem conversations.
Apparently, at that time, she was very pleased with her strategy although it was
too soon to expect results from it. If we analyse this strategy, we will find some
interesting elements. First, although the grammatical form has been chosen by her, the
actual phrasal verbs she is going to Ieam depend on the teacher’s speech, a sort of shared
control, in which she controls the focus on phrasal verbs (her own choice) but the teacher
(unconsciously) controls other factors (when, how, what). Second, her strategy consists
of monitoring and imitating native speaker speech but with her in a conscious and on-
going state of focusing and noticing. As I see it, K’s strategy is a very good example of
an attempt for declarativisation through a double approach: a top-down approach to
understand content and a bottom-up processing to Ieam the form.
For obvious reasons, teacher action as a presentation technique was not present
in the data. However the role of another person (or persons) was salient in some of the
participants activities at this stage. Gl and E reported having asked or discussed a
grammar point with their peers. In both cases it was noted that they looked for this help
in order to compare the peers’ explanations to their own schemas:
E: (reporting on her inquires about 3rd conditional) It was as I thought but
the other person wasn’t wrong either because....
Gl: I asked my peers but I am not sure they are right
Instead of teacher action we could talk here about comparison of peer
explanation.
To sum up, when learners are focused on specific grammar forms, they showed
that they are able to self-regulate the initial stages of learning. In particular they showed
an inclination to work with presentation techniques, being able to select the sources of
linguistic information they wanted to work with and adjusting the explanation provided
by these sources. This conclusion makes me consider some related issues.
First, even though noticing cannot be forced, I believe that one of the ways that a
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