Assessing learners’ awareness in a multiword approach: What do they notice about that they learnt?

The phenomenon of larger grain-size multiword patterns such as formulaic language and collocations in language use is not only well-attested but has been a subject of research in the last two decades. Experimental studies on acquisition of such patterns have generally produced results supporting the use of explicit teaching or attention-drawing techniques for raising learners’ awareness of these vocabulary items. While the quantitative results of these studies often demonstrate big pictures of changes, few have analyzed how learners perceive of and cope with the multiword input given by teachers and experimenters. This presentation reports a section of data from a larger study (Chan, forthcoming) in an attempt to give fuller attention to these learner issues. The EFL learners in this study were first given multiword input and their ability to notice new multiword patterns was tested by a transferability test which asked them to identify meaningful patterns in unseen texts. Stimulated recall interviews were conducted to find out what they noticed in these patterns and this first part of the presentation aims to reveal problems and highlight issues with regard to the learners’ transfer of multiword knowledge. The second part of the presentation proceeds to look for reasons. By reporting further interview data and it presents four factors that can meddle with multiword learning. Throughout the presentation, the link between the learners’ vocabulary knowledge, their awareness of what they learnt, and their learning outcomes will be examined. The aim of this presentation is to promote a discussion of learners’ strategies in learning multiword patterns which is crucial when the ultimate goal of learning is that they can operate independently to make self- discoveries of these patterns. Teaching implications of these findings will be discussed.