Attention, Noticing, and Awareness in Second Language Acquisition

Abstract

The role attention plays in the learning process has almost always been assumed since the earliest studies in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). Any exposure, be it aural or written, manipulated or authentic, to the foreign or second language (L2) is arguably premised on the role of attention on the part of the learner. The SLA field up to the mid-1990s had generally assumed that experimental conditions (instruction or exposure, be it explicit, that is, with awareness, or implicit, that is, without awareness) elicited the required attention paid to the targeted item(s) in the L2 input. This premise is evidenced in the type of research design employed in the studies, which was the classical pretest—experimental condition—posttest design, without any concurrent or online data on learners' actual attention paid to the targeted items in the input. Keywords: psycholinguistics; research methods in applied linguistics; second language acquisition