Noticing Hypothesis

Noticing Hypothesis

1. Richard Schmidt theory.

   • Introduction
     • Due to the advent of cognitive psychology and Chomsky’s innatistic propositions, more theories in the late 1980s started paying attention to human’s internal system of understanding and learning languages, known as cognitive linguistics.
       • The idea of ‘attention’, ‘awareness’ or ‘noticing’ in second language acquisition emerged in this period.
   • “Noticing Hypothesis” and its impact on SLA
     • Schmidt provides a clear definition of ‘noticing’ in second language acquisition. He first introduces the term ‘consciousness’ as a broader category of human’s cognitive system and divides it into three subcategories:
       • consciousness as awareness, consciousness as intention, and consciousness as knowledge.
         • The term ‘noticing’ refers to “focal awareness” in his definition, and at this level one can pay attention to a certain stimuli as a “private experience” and “report it verbally”. Though noticing does not result in acquisition by itself, it greatly facilitates learning and acquisition.
           • The notion of ‘noticing’ can be embedded into this process as follows: Second language acquisition is generally described as the process of building the ‘interlanguage’. Interlanguage is a learner’s knowledge of the target language internalised through receiving input and integrating intake.
             • One notable impact of the hypothesis was that it challenged Krashen’s proposition that language learning was an unconscious process. Thus, the hypothesis has led to the development of teaching methods that emphasize learner’s consciousness.
   • “Comprehensible Input”
     • Stephen Krashen’s “Monitor Model” is the best known model of second language acquisition influenced by Noam Chomski’s innatist theory of first language acquisition.
       • There are five basic hypotheses in this model: the Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis, the Monitor Hypothesis, the Natural Order Hypothesis, the Comprehensible Input Hypothesis, and the Affective Filter Hypothesis.
         • The Comprehensible Input Hypothesis, one of the five hypotheses above, is based on the principle that language acquisition occurs when one is exposed to language almost all of which is comprehensible. Learners learn a new language when they receive input that is just a little more difficult than what they can easily understand.
   • Word definition
     • One of the traditional ways of learning new words in EFL classes is directly translating the words of the target language (TL: English) into the learner’s first language (L1: Nihongo) and vice versa. However, the focus in this process is mainly on form.
       • The definition should be given in the words that are comprehensible to the learners. Then learners think of the meanings of the new words in the TL. For example, if ‘refrigerator’ is a new word, the learners understand it as ‘reizouko’ in Japanese.
   • Conclusion
     • This paper has shown that Noticing Hypothesis effectively facilitates second language learning and contributes to the link between input and output and between implicit teaching and explicit teaching. Although those factors are often portrayed as oppositional - that one is more important than the other.

2. Do. en F. Crespo Hernández Ixchel