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A: ATTENTION
This second PACE step is intended to establish a conscious joint focus of attention on some aspect of the language used during the Presentation. In the Presentation phase, students may not pay attention to important aspects of the language that will help them progress in proficiency. As second language acquisition research found, attention and noticing are essential to the language acquisition process. As we grow older, implicit learning declines, and we cannot acquire what we do not attend to or notice. The Attention phase takes place in a relatively short period of time. It is the phase of the lesson where the teacher has the opportunity to draw learners’ attention to the form that will be discussed in more detail in the next phase of the lesson. A good way to think about the Attention phase is to ask oneself if all students were aware of and paid attention to the form that will become the focus of dialogic inquiry. For example, were students aware that a change in verb form signaled a change of speaker or change of time, that individuals changed how they addressed each other depending on their status or relationship with each other, or to how the same attribute changed depending on who was described, or to the differences in how settings in the past were described compared to past actions that move the story line forward? Thus, in this phase, the teacher points out a form of the language, usually in a visual way, for the purpose of ensuring that all students are focused on the form for later discussion. Additionally, from the perspective of language processing, if the role of the presentation is to establish meaning, then it is quite likely that students did not focus explicitly on the forms of the language in any systematic and conceptual way. If focus on form is to occur, then this focus needs to be mediated by the teacher before trying to engage students in a conversation about form
and meaning connections, and the form’s use in the context of the story. Without this important phase, lessons can easily be derailed and conversations can take place at cross-purposes.
Highlighting a form during the Attention phase can be achieved in several ways.
One of the most obvious ways is to simply direct students’ attention to the use of a form in the text. For example, a teacher might state: “In the story that you just heard, a lot of action that the characters performed were in the past. Here is a list of some of those actions. Do you remember hearing these actions, and can you act them out for the class?” Teachers can also ask general questions about patterns that the students might have noticed in the text or about words and phrases repeated in a story. For example, teachers might ask, “Did you notice anything different about some of the words you heard in this story?” “What phrase did the main character repeat many times?” or “Did you notice how these particular words changed when we were referring to the man or the woman?” This attention and noticing phase should not be confused with developing conceptual understanding or constructing an explanation or generalization. Its purpose is to bring the form into the students’ consciousness so conceptual understanding can be developed in a collaborative conversation in the next phase of the lesson. In sociocultural terms, we may call this phase establishing intersubjectivity. Conscious focus of attention can also be established visually. PowerPoint presentations of example sentences from the Presentation story can be prepared, with important words and phrases color-coded or underlined. Students could be asked if they noticed these sentences and if they realized what was happening in these sentences as the story was being told. Even a low-tech approach such as using a handout or the blackboard can be an effective way to call explicit attention to form as long as the display of sample
sentences are organized in a way to make the target form and meaning visible and obvious to the learners (e.g., positive statements from the story on one side of the board and negative statements on the other side). The point of this step is to help learners focus conscious attention on the target form and its meaning in the story without needless elaboration or wasted time. For this reason, the Attention phase of a PACE lesson may last only a few minutes to focus student attention on the form and to identify it as the topic of the upcoming conversation. It should also be pointed out that learners might show curiosity about certain aspects of the language. That is, if teachers are truly in the ZpD of the learners, they will be attentive to where their students’ development is headed and not just to the lesson objective as determined by the teacher. In addition to having clear goals and outcomes for the lesson, teachers should allow for the possibility that the grammatical agenda may be set by students when their curiosity about the language emerges. By assessing whether attention was drawn to a particular structure and what structures students express interest in understanding more about, the teacher can determine aspects of the language that were not transparent and need clarification. In summary, the Attention phase recognizes that joint attention between teacher and students needs to be established for learning to occur. Joint attention to specific grammatical features of the language can be established explicitly and directly through various mediational means, such
as printed text with enhancements or questions that direct attention.
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