Flagged Input

A materials-design technique in which selected linguistic features are made perceptually or positionally prominent so that learners are more likely to notice them and process them for acquisition. Tomlinson developed the term as part of his text-driven, awareness-raising approach to coursebook writing: rather than pre-teaching forms, the writer engineers the text and the surrounding tasks so that target items rise out of the input on their own.

What flagging looks like

Flagging is a writer's toolkit, not a single device. Typesetting choices (bold, italics, underlining, colour) make a form visually salient on the page. Positional choices (placing the target form at sentence beginnings or in the title) exploit prominence in the text itself. Repetition within the same text or across nearby texts increases encounter frequency without abandoning natural prose. Framing tasks direct attention by asking the learner to do something that cannot be done without processing the target form, such as locating all the time markers in a narrative or matching reported clauses to the original utterances. The common thread is that learners meet the form first as meaningful input and only afterwards confront it as a learning target.

Distinct from input enhancement

The broader SLA construct is input enhancement, defined by Sharwood Smith (1993) as any deliberate manipulation of input that makes selected features more salient to the learner, including textual enhancement, recasts, and instructional flooding. Tomlinson's flagged input is the materials-design implementation of that construct. Where Sharwood Smith's framework spans research operationalisations across instructional settings, flagged input names what the coursebook writer does on the page: type, layout, positioning, repetition, and task design that conspire to raise the salience of items the writer wants learners to notice. The relationship is one of scope. Input enhancement is the theoretical category; flagged input is the authoring craft.

Why it works in Tomlinson's framework

Tomlinson's text-driven approach proceeds from engagement with meaning to noticing of form. Flagging supports the second move without collapsing it into the first. If the learner has already responded affectively and cognitively to a text, a well-flagged form invites a reflective pass at language. The risk Tomlinson flags in turn is over-flagging: heavy bold, on-page glossaries, and explicit "find the past perfect" prompts can pre-empt the noticing they were meant to provoke and convert the activity into a recognition exercise. The principle is to make the form available to attention, not to substitute the writer's attention for the learner's.

Design caveats

Three constraints recur in Tomlinson's writing. Flagging should not distort the text: a paragraph engineered to deliver six instances of the present perfect in three sentences ceases to be input and becomes a drill. Flagging should be calibrated to level: lower-level learners benefit from heavier visual cues, higher-level learners from lighter, more positional cues. And flagging should be paired with what Tomlinson calls discovery activities, where the learner generalises from the flagged instances rather than receiving the rule pre-formed. Without that downstream task, salience without uptake is the typical outcome.

References

• Sharwood Smith, M. (1993). Input enhancement in instructed SLA: Theoretical bases. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 15(2), 165–179.
• Tomlinson, B. (1994). Pragmatic awareness activities. Language Awareness, 3(3–4), 119–129.
• Tomlinson, B. (Ed.). (2011). Materials Development in Language Teaching (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.