Monitor use by adult second language learners

The first question of this doctoral study deals with the influence of the factors Time Pressure (present or absent) and Focus of Attention (on information or on grammatical accuracy) on the correct use of two Dutch word-order patterns, in the speech of 32 adult learners of Dutch as a second language. In an experimental repeated-measures design, using a story-retelling task, Attention had a significant effect but Time had not. The second question concerns the relation between explicitness of rule knowledge, assessed in an interview, and rule application in the story-retelling task. It was found that, as expected, the learners without explicit knowledge of the two word-order rules made more errors in the story-retelling task than learners with explicit knowledge. Importantly, however, learners with implicit and explicit knowledge were affected by Time and Attention to the same extent. The findings are discussed in terms of Krashen’s Monitor Theory and in terms of an information-processing approach that distinguishes executive control from metacognitive knowledge.