Response to The Availability of Conscious Knowledge: A Comment on Lindseth (2016)
Martina Lindseth (PhD, Indiana University, Bloomington) is Professor of German, University of Wisconsin‐Eau Claire.
Abstract
My study (Lindseth, The Effects of Form‐Focused Instruction on the Acquisition of Subject‐Verb Inversion in German) that was published in the Volume 49, No. 1 issue of Foreign Language Annals suggested that form‐focused instruction that targets a specific structure may help learners progress faster toward accurate use of this structure in spontaneous speech, i.e., a situation that does not appear to allow monitoring or consciously applying rules. In his letter to the editor in this issue, Dr. Krashen questioned whether participants were, indeed, using language in a spontaneous way. He framed his concerns in terms of his 1982 hypothesis, which states that second language performers can access and apply conscious knowledge when all three of the following conditions are met: (1) speakers consciously know the rule, (2) they are thinking about correctness, and (3) they have time to apply the rule. I do not agree that all three conditions were met in my study.
