A fundamental belief underlying traditional Chinese approaches to second language
(L2) instruction is that explicitly represented knowledge about the target language
can become increasingly available for spontaneous use through practice. The
present study addresses this belief by investigating whether instructed Chinese
learners' metalinguistic knowledge about English is mobilized in their production
and what psychological factors may impinge on access to such knowledge. Drawing
on previous work on knowledge representation, information processing, and human
categorization, it was hypothesized that real-time access to metalinguistic
knowledge in L2 production would be affected by the amount of attention allocated
to formal accuracy, the level of automaticity reached in processing such knowledge,
and the linguistic prototypicality of the target use concerned. These hypotheses
are supported by the results of a quasi-experiment on 60 instructed Chinese
learners of English.
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