The Language “Noticing” Hypothesis (Main Ideas)

The Language “Noticing” Hypothesis (Main Ideas)

1. “Comprehensible Input”

   • Learners learn a new language when they receive input that is just a little more difficult than what they can easily understand.
   • It is the language teacher’s responsibility to provide the students with the appropriate opportunities for comprehensible input both inside and outside of the classroom.
   • 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.

2. What is “Noticing” Hypothesis?

   • ‘consciousness’
     • broader category of human’s cognitive system
       • consciousness as awareness
         • perception, noticing, and understanding.
       • consciousness as intention
       • consciousness as knowledge
   • 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 only linguistic elements in the input that learners can acquire are those elements that they notice”

3. Classroom Activities for Comprehensible Input

   • form-focused
   • meaning-focused
     • Here are four examples of activities for comprehensive input which focus more on meaning than on form
       • 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
         • 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.
       • Cloze test
         • In this activity, basically every nth word is missing from the text and the learners fill in the blanks with the best possible word for each blank.
         • To complete this activity, the learners have to read words and phrases around the blanks, and they may guess the appropriate word from the context or from their recognition of the part of speech that should be written in the blanks.
       • Questions and answers
         • Asking students questions about the contents of a text that they have just read is one of the familiar activities traditionally observed in language classrooms.
       • Designing a Language Curriculum
         • Although comprehensible input or meaning-focused input is an important factor, it is not the only factor that leads second language learners to successful second language acquisition.
         • It is the teacher’s responsibility to understand each learner’s characteristics and needs in language learning, and try to lower the learners’ affective filter as well as to provide the learners with both quantitative and qualitative input.

4. Implications for English language teaching in Japan

   • A teaching method significantly developed by Noticing Hypothesis is ‘focus on form’ instruction or ‘form-focused’ instruction.
     • It can be defined as the “inversion in which simultaneous attention is brought to both meaning and how that meaning is encoded”
   • It is essential for an effective and efficient teacher of English language to integrate various teaching approaches, methods and techniques.