Attention, Awareness, and Noticing in SLA: A Methodological Review

Jieun Ahn, Mostafa Papi, Ji-Hyun Park
2022
Schmidt's Noticing Hypothesis (1990, 1994, 1995, 2001), which proposes that the process of noticing enables the conversion of input to intake, has been hugely influential and is now "regarded as a mainstream SLA construct" (Yoshioka, Frota, & Bergsleithner, 2013, p. 7). Early studies on noticing mainly involved the issue of whether attention or awareness— and what types—were necessary for L2 learning (Gass, 1997; Leow, 1997, 2000; Robinson, 1995; Schmidt, 1990; Tomlin & Vila, 1994). However,
more » ... earchers have begun to note that it is important to ascertain how to operationalize and measure noticing for empirical testing (Philp, 2012). Given that L2 learners' internal cognitive activities are neither directly measureable nor observable, the difficulty we face in measuring noticing is not surprising. Moreover, "the terms noticing, attention, and awareness have lacked in precision" (Gass, Behney, & Plonsky, 2013, p. 266) across studies, resulting in inconsistencies in the measures of noticing. To gain access to learners' cognitive processes of noticing, online/concurrent measures (e.g., think-alouds, underlining) and off-line/non-concurrent measures (e.g., post-task questionnaires, pretest-posttest, stimulated recall) have been widely used in SLA.
doi:10.17613/qsvm-vc32 fatcat:pln6dlqfgvf4dajeyfdtavcdfq