In the literature of second language acquisition, many similar terms such as noticing, awareness, consciousness, attention etc, are used. Due to their interface, they are sometimes used interchangeably. Therefore, it is necessary to
review some influential definitions given by scholars.
1. Schmidt’s Definition of Noticing
In Schmidt’s view (1994), consciousness can be distinguished in different dimensions, such as awareness, intention and knowledge. However, In both common usage and theoretic treatment of the topic, consciousness is commonly
equated with awareness (cited in Schmidt 1990). Schmidt (1990) further claims that awareness has different levels or degrees including noticing and understanding. Noticing, by which “stimuli are subjectively experienced,” and which is defined as “availability for verbal report” (p.132), required focal attention. Understanding, which means we can “analyze”, “compare”, “reflect”, “comprehend” (p.132) etc, is what we commonly refer to as thinking. Thus,
understanding represents a deeper level of awareness than noticing which is limited to "elements of the surface structure of utterance of utterances in the input" instead of understanding rules(Schmidt,2001,p.5). Schmidt's (1990) claim about the necessity of noticing does not refer to higher level understanding or awareness of language.
Schmidt (1990, 2001) attaches great important to noticing and argues that noticing is necessary for learning and is a process of attending consciously to linguistic features in the input. Some scholars (eg. Sharwood-Smith, 1981;
McLaughlin, 1987) also advocate that noticing a feature in the input is an essential first step in language processing whereas they differ from Schmidt in that they consider that noticing a feature in input may be a conscious or an unconscious process.
2. Tomlin & Villa’s Understanding on Noticing
In preference to a single global construct, Tomlin and Villa (1994) argue for the greater explanatory power of three theoretically and empirically distinguishable components of attention: alterness, orientation, and detection. alertness, which refers to the learners‟ readiness to dealing with the incoming stimuli or data; orientation, which means the direction of attentional resources to certain type of stimuli of data; detection referring to the “cognitive registration of sensory stimuli”, “ the process that selects, or engages a particular and specific bit of information”. In their view, detection is most closely associated with Schmidt‟s concept of noticing, but differs from it in that such detection does not require awareness. "Awareness plays a potential role for detection, helping set up the circumstances for detection but it does not directly lead to detection itself" (Tomlin and Villa, 1993, p.14).
3. Robinson’s Idea on Noticing
Robinson (1995) gave a stricter definition of noticing, he compromised between these two mentioned above, claiming that noticing is what both detected by learners and further activated as a result of the allocation of attentional
resources. That is, noticing means detection plus rehearsal. The concept of Rehearsal suggests that the learners must make some conscious effort to memorize the new forms they have noticed. It could be silently repeating a phases or sentence, reading the sentences a few times, or doing anything else that help commit the linguistic features to short-term memory.
The discussion indicates the distinction between conscious „learning‟ and subconscious „acquisition‟ is overly too simplistic. It is clear that „acquisition‟ intended by Krashen involves some degree of consciousness, for the optimal input i+1, the learners must notice the “gap”.
In brief, this paper, I assert the higher level of awareness, that is, the level of understanding linguistic rules or metalinguistic awareness, is not required, however, awareness at the level of noticing, that is, the learner's subjective registration of the stimulus event, is necessary for second language learning, especially for adult learners. Schmidt (2000) defines noticing as the correlate to what psychologists call “attention”. So noticing and attention are used
interchangeably in this paper.