The language "Noticing" Hypothesis

The language "Noticing" Hypothesis

1. The most famous proponent of the notion is Richard Schmid

   • His "Noticing Hypothesis" originates from a case study of a Japanese learner of English
     • Wes had acquired very good fluency but had not sufficiently learned morphologycal or syntactic accuracy
       • The learner did not develop muchmorphology and grammar primarily because he may have lacked the aptitude to do so
         • He therefore relied exclusively on implicit learning through interaction alone, with little attention to form and structure

2. “Noticing Hypothesis” and its impact on SLA

   • Schmid provides a clear definition of ‘noticing’ in second language acquisition.
     • He introduces the term ‘consciousness’ as a broader category of human’s cognitive system and divides it into three subcategories
       • Consciousness as awareness consists of three levels: perception, noticing, and understanding
       • The term ‘noticing’ refers to “focal awareness” in his definition
       • This level one can pay attention to a certain stimuli as a “private experience” and “report it verbally”
   • The notion of ‘noticing’ can be embedded into this process
     • 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

3. “Comprehensible Input”

   • “Monitor Model” is the best known model of second language acquisition
     • There are five basic hypotheses in this model
       • The Comprehensible Input Hypothesis 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

4. Classroom Activities for Comprehensible Input

   • In second language acquisition, there are two types of learning
     • Form-focused learning
     • Meaning-focused learning
   • In traditional educational approaches such as grammar-translation method
     • Which has often been severely criticized for not having succeeded in producing successful learners who can communicate in English language fluently with other “expert users” of English
   • Word definition
     • One of the traditional ways of learning new words in EFL classes is directly translating the words of the target language into the learner’s first language
       • After the learners have understood the meaning of the new words both in the TL and in their L1, the teacher then provides the definition of the words in the TL.
         • Extensive reading
           • Reading a great deal of texts enhances the students’ vocabulary, and one of the benefits of simplified readers is that students encounter a reasonable number of new words
   • Cloze test
     • Can be used for a comprehensible input activity
       • 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
             • 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.

5. 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
       • The explicit introduction of the target grammar as the input will help the students to notice the key structure
         • When they work on the writing activity as output, the students would be paying attention to both the form and contents of their work by themselves
           • ‘Corrective feedback’
             • Is a method based on Noticing Hypothesis.
               • It can be implicit or explicit and enables a learner to check and notice his/her interlanguage.

6. Karla Marggy Reyes Sánchez