Teaching and learning a second language involve many aspects, one of which concerns students’ mental processing. Understanding how students process languages is a key issue to help them acquire the language. This mental processing has often been researched through interaction. One of the claims often made is that interaction can facilitate learning by helping students draw their attention to form.
Recently, the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) extends the research of interaction to the issue of syntactic priming, originating from the field of psychology. The notion refers to the tendency for people to repeat the syntactic structure of the previously heard in their subsequent language production (McDonough 2006). Extending such mental processing into teaching, the field of SLA attempts to utilize the tendency for processing the previously heard syntactic structure to facilitate teaching. |