This study examined the effects of learner-initiated noticing through comparison and teacher-initiated noticing through grammar instruction on EFL middle school learners' English writing process and uptake. For the study, 18 second-year middle school students with intermediate-high English proficiency were divided into three groups. After the first writing composition, one group (Group C) underwent a comparison stage, in which they compared their original writings and reformulated versions. Another group (Group I) received reactive grammar instruction on the four most frequent types of grammar errors, while the other group (Group IC) underwent both stages. All three groups revised their original writings in the next stage. To examine the learners' cognitive processes, think-aloud protocols were analyzed. The results showed that Group IC performed better in uptake than the other two groups, while no major differences were found between Groups I and C. This suggests that a mixture of learner-initiated noticing and teacher-initiated noticing influenced the learners' uptake.

The present study investigates the effect of peer evaluation tasks on learners’ noticing and production of prominence. Attention is placed on the students’ noticing episodes during the task, and whether the student utilizes what is noticed into their re-recordings to achieve more intelligible speech. The results reveal that the students directed their attention to the features of prominence, with metalinguistic reflections evident in their transcriptions and exchanges of evaluative comments. The students’ first and second recordings were then assessed by four native speakers based on five criteria: comprehensibility, rhythm, stress, intonation, and perceived naturalness. The ratings indicated that the students’ second recordings were evaluated lower in intelligibility and were regarded as being unnatural, forced, and overly exaggerated in their production of prominence. Lastly, qualitative analyses of the audio revealed that the post-task recordings involved an increased frequency of stress production, but the exaggerated prosodic qualities in pitch, elongation, and volume may have been contributing factors leading to lower intelligibility.

Despite the increasing interest in noticing by second language (L2) learners during the output process, little attention has been given to child L2 learners’ noticing and output. Thus, the present study investigated what child L2 learners of different English proficiency levels noticed as they composed a text and received written corrective feedback (WCF) (error correction vs. models), and how they incorporated the noticed features into their revised texts. Data were collected from twenty-six child pairs throughout three stages (composition, comparison, and revision stages) and note-taking was employed as a means of measuring learner noticing. It was found that learners were able to initiate noticing on their own when composing texts, and that highproficiency learners tended to attend to grammatical problems more frequently than medium/low-proficiency learners. WCF played a facilitative role in leading learners to notice, and their attention to language was mediated differently by different types of WCF. Learners incorporated the noticed features into their revisions, and textual revisions were mostly lexical. Error correction (EC) triggered more grammatical revisions, while the model text helped learners to notice something beyond what they could produce on their own. These findings suggest a facilitative role for output and WCF as a means of learner noticing, and the different roles of EC and model texts.

Recognizing the importance of output and noticing in the second language acquisition, the present study investigated whether model writings and noticing-triggering activities can serve as one form of written feedback to learners’ writing. Particularly, it was interested in whether two different noticing-triggering activities would have different effects on learners’ noticing and incorporation in immediate and delayed revisions. To this end, 93 university students in three English composition classes in Busan were asked to take part in four-staged picture-cued narrative writing task (i.e., drafting, comparison, immediate revision, and delayed revision). The three classes engaged in different activities (i.e., note-taking, underlining, or reading) while they were comparing their own writing and the given models. The results indicated that models as written feedback have led learners to notice linguistic forms that they have previously found problematic or have not thought of as problematic. Furthermore, the note-taking activity in the comparison stage seemed to help learners better incorporate the linguistic forms included in the subsequent input.

As a replication study of Hanaoka and Izumi (2012), the present research investigated the process of learners’ noticing of problems in their interlanguage (IL) while they were producing the second language (L2) and their process of relevant input provided in the form of two types of feedback (i.e., reformulation and a model text) in L2 writing. The data were collected from twenty-five university students in Korea, and they engaged in a four-staged picture description task consisting of the writing stage (Stage 1), the comparison stage (Stage 2), the immediate revision stage (Stage 3), and the delayed revision stage (Stage 4). It was found that output triggered learners’ noticing of problems; however, the problems did not always show up overtly in their writing. Some problems were manifested in writing (i.e., overt problems), while some were hidden (i.e., covert problems). A model text and reformulation played somewhat different roles in offering the solutions to the problems: a model text provided more solutions to covert problems while reformulation provided more solutions to overt problems. And, the extent of learners’ noticing was associated with the types of problems (overt vs. covert problems) and feedback (i.e., models vs. reformulation). However, the types of problems and feedback were not related to the rate of incorporation of feedback into subsequent writing.

The present study was motivated by the claim that attention and noticing are important for SLA and investigated the extent to which learners may notice the target form and its subsequent learning through noticing. To address the methodological concern about how to collect and analyze noticing data, the dictogloss procedure was employed following Swain’s (1998) suggestion. The transcripts of LREs of each pair of the learners were examined to capture the moments when their attention was drawn to form for their L2 output when performing a dictogloss. In general, the basic premise that the more attention to the form, the better its chance of learning was attested. There was also a positive relationship between the extent of noticing and subsequent learning and the learner’s readiness for the target form. This result led to the second research question which explores what factors constrain noticing and learning of the target form. Internal learner capacities (i.e. readiness, attentional capacity, bias, type of processing, and familiarity) appear to be the crucial constraining factors on noticing and subsequent learning. There was a disparity between the extent of noticing and learning outcomes in the case of some learners. This disparity seems partly due to the problem with the coding of noticing data. Therefore, the present study suggests that concerns still exist about how to best operationalize and measure the noticing of L2 forms. Finally, the limitations of this study are discussed and suggestions for future research are provided.

This study investigates the collaborative task of dictogloss, which can be described as a communicative based activity which allows for the focus of form. The current study employed two dictogloss tasks in immediate repetition, and an examination was done concerning the ability of learners to notice recently taught target lexical items (TLIs) as they occurred during the individual and collaborative activities of the tasks. Fifty three Korean EFL learners enrolled as second year students in the English Department of a university in Seoul, South Korea, participated in the study. The results indicated that learners can successfully notice and attend to TLIs in addition to other grammatical forms during both individual and collaborative activity, and that immediate repetition of the dictogloss showed to increase these instances of noticing. The pedagogical implications of dictogloss as an effective learning procedure for promoting vocabulary noticing are discussed, in addition to the benefits of immediate repetition to further increase new vocabulary noticing.

This study examined the effects of learners’ prior knowledge of a linguistic form on the noticing function of output (Swain, 1995), which might mediate second language (L2) production and learning. Based on the degree of prior knowledge of the target form, the participants were divided into four levels. The noticing scores (measured by underlining in the subsequent input) showed that Level 2 participants—who had partial knowledge of the target form—noticed more target forms than the other levels and the comparison group. The participants in the experimental group produced more target forms on the second output activity than on the first output activity. However, learners’ increased noticing did not lead to immediate increased improvement of production and learning. Some prior knowledge of the target form was able to mediate noticing of the form, but one-time noticing might not be enough for promoting improvement of production and learning of the target form.

Kim, Kyu-hyun. 2004. A Conversation Analysis of Korean Sentence-Ending Modal Suffixes -ney, -kwun(a), and -ta: Noticing as a Social Action. Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea, 12(1). Drawing upon H. S. Lee's (1993) cognitively-oriented research on the functions of three sentence-ending modal suffixes in Korean that are used to express newly perceived information, -ney, -kwun(a), and -ta, this study analyzes the distinct meanings of these suffixes from a conversation-analytic perspective (Sacks et al. 1974). The suffix -ney is used in the context in which the speaker notices a referent/event and makes an assessment on the spot in such a way that the speaker's stance displayed through the action is formulated as something that is to be immediately oriented to and contingently taken up by the hearer. In contrast, the suffix -kwun(a) is used when the speaker is mainly oriented to displaying a stance congruent with the prior talk. The action it organizes is often limited to acknowledging a point of the prior talk or having the hearer acknowledge the speaker's observation, often with a salient topic-curtailing and sequence-terminating import. The suffix -ta tends to orient the hearer to the next stage of the speaker's action (e.g., suggestion, warning, offer, etc.) to whose directive force the hearer is variably implicated as a beneficiary/facilitator. The interactional account offered in this paper is shown to complement Lee's cognitive account, with emphasis placed on examining the ways in which these suffixes are used as resources for organizing distinct types of social action.