Abstract :
The role of awareness or consciousness in learning has been a relatively contentious issue in non-SLA fields (e.g., cognitive psychology). With the publications of Williams (2004, 2005), a similar debate appears to be brewing in the field of SLA. Contrary to Leow (2000), who reported that unawareness did not appear to play an important role in second or foreign language development, Williams (2005) offered empirical evidence that learning without awareness appears to be feasible. At the same time, it is also noted that Leowʹs and Williamsʹs (2005) research designs measured unawareness at different stages (online encoding and offline retrieval, respectively) of the acquisi-tional process. The present study revisited and extended Williamsʹs (2005) study by using a hybrid design to gather concurrent data at the stage of encoding and during the testing phase as well as non-concurrent data after the experimental exposure. Some methodological changes were also implemented to probe deeper into learnersʹ thought processes. The quantitative analyses performed on the data of 34 carefully screened participants revealed that, at the encoding stage, unaware learners do not appear capable of selecting or producing the correct determiner-noun combination when required to do
