Learners’ disengagement with corrective feedback in an English for Academic Purposes course: Rote learning, proficiency and depth of processing

Noticing, or awareness, as an influential concept in SLA has been characterised as a gradient (Leow, 2000; Schmidt, 1994): Awareness at the level of perception, awareness at the level of understanding, and awareness at the level of reporting – where learners are able to apply and verbalise rules. Aside from seeing the notion as a continuum, awareness may be partial and variable: a learner may be aware of one grammatical feature but fail to recognise others, even when they are known or simple. The importance of awareness as a notion lies in one principle: for something to be learned, it must be cognitively and consciously processed.

In a self-access component of an EAP course, learners were presented with explanations for errors and were expected to rote-learn the rules at their own pace. They were tested on perception (noticing) and production throughout the course. The first finding from this study is the undergraduate students’ disengagement with corrective feedback, along with the introduction of new errors.

The second finding to be reported is a classification of these undergraduate students’ ‘misses’ after a quantitative analysis through MAXQDA, which revealed the learners’ different levels of success in incorporating linguistic forms into their production. The beneficial role of rote learning is challenged, and the authors of this study sought explanations for these results and their implications for EAP instruction.