Schmidt, R. (2010). Attention, awareness, and individual differences in language learning. In W. M. Chan, S. Chi, K. N. Cin, J. Istanto, M. Nagami, J. W. Sew, T. Suthiwan, & I. Walker, Proceedings of CLaSIC 2010, Singapore, December 2-4 (pp. 721-737). Singapore: National University of Singapore, Centre for Language Studies.
ATTENTION, AWARENESS, AND INDIVIDUAL
DIFFERENCES IN LANGUAGE LEARNING
Richard Schmidt
schmidt@hawaii.edu
The University of Hawaii at Manoa, U.S.A.
Abstract
The Noticing Hypothesis—an hypothesis that input does not become intake for language learning unless it is noticed, that is, consciously registered (Schmidt, 1990, 2001)—has been around now for about two decades and continues to generate experimental studies, suggestions for L2 pedagogy, conference pap
ers and controversy. To many people, the idea that SLA is largely driven by what learners pay attention to and become aware of in target language input seems the essence of common sense. In the simplest terms, people learn about the things that they pay attention to and do not learn much about the things they do not attend to. Others consider the hypothesis to be undesirably vague, lacking in empirical support, or incompatible with well-grounded theories. In this talk I will review the evidence for the hypothesis, as well the major objections that have been raised against it, paying particular attention to learner characteristics such as motivation, aptitude, and language learning history that affect what learners notice and become aware of when processing L2 input.
1. Introduction
The Noticing Hypothesis –an hypothesis that input does not become intake for language learning unless it is noticed, that is, consciously registered (Schmidt, 1990, 2001)—documented evidence
driven by what learners pay attention to and become aware of in target language input seems the essence of common sense. In the simplest terms, people learn about the things that they attend to and do not learn much about the things they do not attend to. Others consider the hypothesis to be undesir
ably vague, lacking in empirical support, or incompatible with well-grounded theories. In this paper I will review some of the evidence for the hypothesis, as well the major objections that have been raised against it from a variety of perspectives: linguistic, psychological, sociocultural, and philosophical. I will conclude the discussion by considering the role of individual differences in noticing and awareness and the ways that these may interact in the process of second language acquisition.
2. Origins of the Noticing Hypothesis and Evidence for It
In the 1980s, the dominant theories of language and of SLA overwhelmingly emphasized the unconscious nature of linguistic knowledge and unconscious processes of learning. Two case studies that I carried out in those years led me to question those assumptions. The first was a case study of an adult naturalistic (uninstructed) learner of English, an artist from Japan who immigrated to the U.S. at age 30 for a mix of personal and professional reasons, to whom I gave the pseudonym “Wes” and whose acquisition of English I documented over a period of several years (Schmidt, 1983, 1984). Wes was a remarkably good learner of English in many ways. His pronunciation was good from the beginning, and he developed quickly along the dimensions of fluency, lexical development, listening comprehension, conversational ability, pragmatic appropriateness, and especially strategic competence, the ability to get his message across in spite of the limitations of his interlanguage. If lang
uage is seen as a medium of communication, as a tool for initiating, maintaining and regulating relationships and carrying on the business of life, then Wes was (and has continued to be) a very successful language learner. Looking at Wes through a sociocognitive lens, seeing language as social practice to accomplish social action and viewing SLA as alignment, fitting oneself to one’s environment, mediated and scaffolded by various actors and structures (Atkinson, 2010) also allows us to see Wes as a very good learner. His development in the area of grammar —morphology and syntax— was very limited, however. I did not know and still do not know the reasons for this for sure, but one possible explanation may be that he didn’t care much for the small grammatical details of
language. Or perhaps he just didn’t notice them. For example, after several years of exposure he continued to say things like Yesterday I’m go beach and Tomorrow I’m go beach (with no articles, no prepositions, and no tense marking), even though he surely heard people say things like I went to the beach yesterday, but apparently without registering the forms. In other cases, it seemed that he probably did notice grammatical forms in input and tried to figure them out, but his guesses were often inaccurate. For example, after some time I became aware that he never produced any utterances with the English possessive pronoun our, and eventually realized that this was not because of egocentrism or a fondness for the English word my, but simply because he did not know the form. Instead, he would
say things like We are come back here early, we are apartment apparently meaning “We came back early to our apartment.” My best guess is that this resulted from a mis-identification by Wes of their (as in their apartment) as “they are” and your (as in your apartment) as “you are” —therefore, we are meaning “our,” an analysis supported by the fact that he also said things like she’s name (meaning “her name”) and your friend is house (“your friend’s house”). More generally, looking nine English grammatical morphemes and taking 80% correct as a criterion for acquisition, I found that none moved from unacquired to acquired status in three years of observation. In trying to understand why Wes had such persistent problems with grammar (morphology, specifically), it seemed to me that affective factors such as motivation were probably not the answer. Indeed, his very good development in overall communicative competence seemed a reflection of his strong drive to communicate, coupled with a gregarious personality and willingness to take risks in speaking and learning. To explain why Wes did not develop much morphology, therefore, I considered two main possibilities: lack of aptitude and over-reliance on an implicit learning strategy, learning through interaction alone, with little attention to language form and little conscious reflection about language structure. I concluded by proposing that, at least in the case of adult learning of grammar, wholly unconscious learning of a language is probably not possible. Because “adults do seem to have lost the still mysterious ability of children to acquire the grammatical forms of language while apparently not paying attention to them” (Schmidt, 1983: 172), some level of conscious attention to form is required.
The second case study concerned my own learning of Portuguese during a five month stay in Brazil (Schmidt & Frota, 1986). I took a class for five weeks, and the rest of my language learning was through interaction with native speakers. The results of this study indicated that classroom instruction was very useful, but presence and frequency in communicative input were more important. In addition, based on comparisons among notes that I kept in a journal, records of what I was taught in class, and monthly tape-recordings of my developing L2 production and interaction abilities, Frota and I found that some forms that
were frequent in input were still not acquired until they were consciously noticed in the input. This was the origin of the Noticing Hypothesis, the claim that learner must attend to and notice linguistic features of the input that they are exposed to if those forms are to become intake for learning. In addition, we found that although I was frequently corrected for my grammatical errors in conversation with native speakers, in many cases this had no effect because I was unaware that I was being corrected. This suggested a slightly different hypothesis that we called “noticing the gap,” the idea that in order to overcome errors, learners must make conscious comparisons between their own output and target language input.
Subsequently I attempted to flesh out these descriptions and informal proposals by matching them wit
h the psychological literature on conscious vs. unconscious learning, which turned out to be a complicated matter, with several different but partly overlapping distinctions in the psychological literature. Reviewing the literature up to the end of the 1980s, I framed the issues in terms of consciousness as intention, consciousness as attention, and consciousness as awareness (Schmidt, 1990), putting forth some claims about each. Consciousness as intention is reflected in the distinction between incidental learning, referring to the fact that people can learn things without having any particular intention to learn them, vs. intentional (goal-directed) learning. Incidental learning is certainly possible and often effective. The classic example is the fact that we learn most vocabulary through reading, although our goal in reading is usually understanding and enjoyment, not vocabulary acquisition. However, the facilitative effect of focused attention on stimulus detection is “all but undisputed” (Roehr, 2008: 83), and deliberately paying attention may be necessary in some cases, for example, when L2 learners fail to notice cues that are not salient or failing to notice cues that need to be processed differently from the way they are in the L1 (Ellis, 2006, 2008).
Consciousness as attention (whether intentional or not), then, seems to be heart of the matter, but like many psychological constructs based initially on common experience, attention does not refer to a single mechanism but to a variety of mechanisms or subsystems, including alertness, orientation, dete
ction within selective attention, facilitation, and inhibition (Schmidt, 2001; Tomlin & Villa, 1994). What these have in common is the function of controlling information processing and behavior when existing skills and routines are inadequate. Learning, establishing new or modified knowledge, memory, skills, and routines is therefore largely, and perhaps exclusively, a side effect of attended processing. Still, the question of whether all learning requires attention remains problematic, and conceptual and methodological issues have combined to make a definitive answer elusive, even after a century of psychological experimentation. Some psychologists have expressed
the opinion that this dispute will never be settled, because zero-point questions are not answerable (Baars, 1988). Baars argues that the important question is not whether there can be any learning without attention and conscious involvement (unanswerable) but rather whether more attention results in more learning. There does not appear to be any evidence at all against the weaker claim that people learn about the things they attend to and learn much less about the things they do not attend to (Logan, Taylor, & Etherton, 1996). Logan, Taylor and Etherton have also proposed a much more controversial hypothesis, that only those stimulus attributes that are attended in processing are encoded. This suggests that attention must be directed to whatever evidence is relevant for a particular learning domain, i.e. that attention must be specifically focused and not just global. In order t
o acquire phonology, one must attend to the sounds of target language input, especially those that are contrastive in the target language, and if one’s goal is to sound like a native speaker, one must attend to phonetic details as well. In order to acquire vocabulary one must attend to both word form (pronunciation, spelling) and to whatever cues are available in input that can lead to identification of meaning. In order to acquire pragmatics, one must attend to both the linguistic form of utterances and the relevant social and contextual features with which they are associated. In order to acquire morphology, one must attend to both the forms of morphemes and their meanings, and in order to acquire syntax one must attend to the order of words and the meanings they are associated with.
The role played by consciousness as awareness in SLA is most controversial. On the one hand, awareness and attention are closely linked —what we are aware of is what we attend to, and what we attend to determines what enters phenomenal consciousness (Baars, 1988)— so if attention is required for learning then perhaps awareness is as well. On the other hand, awareness of abstract rules of grammar cannot be a prerequisite for learning, since native speakers have some intuitive understanding of subtle points of grammar that they cannot verbalize, and some advanced naturalistic L2 learners also have intuitive knowledge that is closer to native speaker intuitions than to the simplified “rules” that are taught in language classes (Rothman, 2008). In psychology, the usual term fo
r this is implicit knowledge, knowledge that is acquired without conscious effort to learn, without awareness that learning has occurred, and without the ability to describe the acquired information (Reber, 1993). The solution I proposed (Schmidt, 1990, 2001) was to distinguish between “noticing” as a technical term limited to the conscious registration of attended specific instances of language, and “understanding,” a higher level of awareness that includes generalizations across instances. Knowledge of rules and metalinguistic awareness of all kinds belong to this higher level of awareness. My proposal is that noticing is necessary for SLA, and that understanding is facilitative but not required.

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