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The purpose of this paper is to examine whether it is possible for learners to simultaneously attend to both form and meaning (VanPatten, 1990). In order to do this, an experiment was undertaken with four advanced adult EFL learners. The material used was the American TV sitcom The Office (Kwapis, 2005). The participants were given three reports. The first report was to pick utterances that interested them, regardless of form and meaning. The second was to identify the characters they thought spoke each utterance. The third was to collect utterances in which they noticed linguistic information according to their teacher’s instruction. The results of the first report showed that the participants seemed to be successful in attending to both form and meaning at the same time. It was not clear, however, whether they consciously attended to both. The results of the second report showed that their attention was mainly based on a protagonist’s utterances, which indicated that they attended to meaning first. The third report showed that three of the participants were hard pressed to attend to form, even though they had been instructed in what to look for. It was found that movies are useful for learning vocabulary. For grammatical knowledge, further research is required. |
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