Maite Camblor-Portilla set out to investigate whether exposure to foreign language input via different types of written feedback has a differential effect on learners' immediate and delayed written production of the uses of the Spanish noun-adjective agreement, when feedback is offered within a cognitive, attentional framework.

Dr. Camblor-Portilla's major challenge was to address several serious methodological limitations that affect the internal validity of the findings obtained by previous studies investigating the effects of L2 written feedback within her research field.

In order to take these limitations into account she decided to incorporate process measures and technological devices to improve the robustness of her research design. Dr. Camblor-Portilla approached CNDLS to help her build a computerized application created with Flash and ColdFusion that would deliver four lessons, as well as their accompanying assessment tasks, set into a split-block design.

Each of the lessons is comprised of a picture description task in which participants describe a series of pictures with objects of different colors. The participants assigned to the implicit group receive feedback in the form of capitalized mistakes; those in the explicit group receive feedback by means of a metalinguistic explanation of the mistake; while participants in the interactive group receive interactive feedback; and those in the control group receive no feedback. The assessment tasks include a controlled and a semi-open production test.

The resulting application consists of a double interface (one for the researcher and one for the participants) that not only administers the treatments and their associated tasks but also tracks, records and manages the data garnered from the participants' interaction with the application to facilitate their analysis.

Measurement of attention and awareness is addressed by means of think aloud protocols, which are digital recordings that trace the participants' oral reactions to the treatments and provide further insight as to which treatments are more conducive to raising attention and awareness.

The results obtained indicate that the provision of written feedback to learners' written production has a beneficial effect on subsequent written production. Also, the provision of feedback leads to higher levels of awareness of the target form. Higher levels of awareness were substantially more effective than lower levels of awareness in helping learners to produce old and new exemplars. However, no conclusive assertion can be made about the beneficial effects of one type of feedback over another.