URBANIZACIÓNES

In response to Krashen’s (1981) claim that only subconscious processes are involved in successful L2 acquisition, Schmidt (1990) originally proposed the importance

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of the conscious mode of learning as a necessary condition for L2 learning. Building on case studies of second language learners, including his own experience of learning Portuguese (Schmidt, 1983; Schmidt & Frota, 1986), Schmidt argued that awareness is facilitative, and perhaps even necessary, in second language acquisition. He also claimed that attention to input is a conscious process (Schmidt, 1990, 1994).

In Schmidt’s view (1994), consciousness can be distinguished in different dimensions, such as awareness, intention and knowledge. Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis (1990) proposes three levels of consciousness as awareness: perception, noticing and understanding. Although Schmidt categorises perception under awareness, he contradicts his own categorisation by arguing that “perceptions are not necessarily conscious” (1990, p. 132). Thus, it is possible to argue that perception is an attentional process that does not involve awareness (i.e., in this, input is registered without being aware of what is being processed). The second level in his model is noticing. For Schmidt (1995), awareness at the level of noticing is different from perception as the former is marked by conscious awareness of, at least, the surface features of the input. Noticing has been described as ‘conscious registration of the occurrence of some event’ (Schmidt, 1995, p. 29) and requiring focal attention (Schmidt, 1990). According to Schmidt (2001), the objects of noticing are the surface features of the input rather than the abstract underlying rules or patterns of grammar. The third and final level in his model is awareness at the level of understanding, which is a higher level of awareness that includes generalisation across incidents. As such, it reflects further processing of L2 data that takes place consciously in order to try to explain or figure out an observed phenomenon. As Schmidt notes, awareness at the level of understanding “implies recognition of a general principle, rule or pattern” (Schmidt, 1995, p. 29) and is connected “to restructuring, and to system learning” (Schmidt, 1993, p. 213).

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In what can be called the strong position of Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis (1990, 1993,1995), Schmidt claims that awareness of the form of the input at the level of ‘noticing’ (that is attention with low level of awareness) is necessary for subsequent processing of L2 data. While perhaps less necessary, understanding is argued to have a facilitating effect on SLA. In opposition to this strong position of Schmidt’s claim that attention to input is a sufficient condition for SLA to occur, Gass (1997) has argued that input is not always a necessary condition for learning to take place. Research that investigated the relative clause accessibility hierarchy (Eckman et al., 1988; Gass, 1997, 1982) indicated that learners were able to generalise their knowledge, after receiving instruction on some types of relative clause, to different relative clauses to which they had not been exposed in the input. These studies provided evidence of the possibility of learning in the absence of input, which is contrary to Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis. Thus, “if no input [to the target structures] existed, how could attention to input be a necessary condition for all aspects of learning?” (Gass, 1997, p. 16).

Considering the contradictory statements to his argument, Schmidt later acknowledged that both awareness at the level of noticing and understanding are facilitative conditions for SLA (Schmidt, 2001, 2010). This is referred to as the weak position of the Noticing Hypothesis, which allows for representation and storage of unattended stimuli in memory but claims that “people learn about the things they attend to and do not learn much about the things they do not attend to” (Schmidt, 2001, p. 30). In line with Gass (1997), Schmidt (2001) noted that not all learning is dependent on input, in that learners are able to infer new knowledge by generalising from their existing knowledge (as has been shown above in the case of relative clauses in English). This view is similar to the usage-based approaches to language acquisition that were discussed in the previous section.

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Moreover, Schmidt acknowledged that different aspects of language (for example, syntax or morphology) may differ in their attentional requirements. This argument was supported by Gass, Sevetics and Lemelin’s (2003) study of L2 Italian, which showed that focused attention had a significantly greater effect on the learning of syntax than vocabulary. Schmidt also shared similar views to those of Long, Taylor and Etherton (1996), who claimed that only those stimulus attributes that are attended to in processing are encoded, which suggests that attention should focus on whatever evidence is relevant for a particular learning domain. For example, in order to acquire pragmatics, one must attend to the linguistic forms as well as to the contextual features with which they are associated (Schmidt, 2010).

It is important to reiterate that Schmidt (2001, and onwards) has maintained his position regarding the importance of attentional processes in SLA, a view that is also subsumed within a number of theoretical frameworks in SLA (N. Ellis, 2005; Leow, 2015). Schmidt acknowledged that it is not possible to separate attention from awareness completely. However, Schmidt (2010) argues that ‘what we are aware of is what we attend to, and what we attend to determines what enters phenomenal consciousness” (p. 725). Accordingly, this argument implies that attention is inseparable from awareness and consciousness, which is a position that is also advocated in Schmidt’s (1990) Noticing Hypothesis.

Some earlier studies in SLA have lent empirical support for the Noticing Hypotheses (e.g., Leow, 1997, 2000, 2001; Rosa & Leow, 2004). In these studies attention is measured by using think-aloud protocols. A study by Leow (1997, 2000) used a crossword puzzle task, as mentioned in details below, to manipulate participants’ attention when exposed to instances of Spanish stem-changing verbs. The findings indicated that the participants who showed a higher level of awareness (awareness at the level of

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understanding) learnt the most, followed by participants who noticed instances but did not show any generalisation, however no evidence of learning was found for participants who did not notice any instances. All in all, the findings from these studies indicated that attention that subsumes a low level of awareness (such as at the level of noticing) seems to contributes to subsequent processing of grammatical information in the input, and that higher levels of awareness (such as at the level of understanding) is more likely to lead to more learning.

However, the role of awareness in language acquisition and possibility of learning without awareness has continued to received considerable consideration over the past years (Godfroid & Winke, 2015; Hama & Leow, 2010; Leow, 2015; Leow & Hama, 2013; Leung & Williams, 2011; Williams, 2005, 2009). Moreover, this interest has also extended to include methodological issues on how to measure awareness (Godfroid & Schmidt, 2013; Hamrick & Rebuschat, 2012; Rebuschat, 2013; Williams & Rebuschat, 2014).

Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis is of relevance to this thesis, as ideas related to attention, noticing and understanding are compatible with the constructional and usage- based approaches adopted in the present study (Bybee & Eddington, 2006; Goldberg, 1995). Schmidt (2010) made an attempt to show the relevance of his position with regard to the role of attention by citing Bybee (2010). According to Bybee (2010), who argued for exemplar-based representations of language, learners experience specific instances or tokens of constructions, with similar tokens (repeated occurrences) being mapped together to form exemplars. These exemplars are “rich memory representations … [containing] at least potentially all the information a language user can perceive in a linguistic experience” (Bybee, 2010, p. 14). These are subsequently grouped together to form categories that represent both fixed (token frequency) and open slots (type frequency) in constructions. Accordingly, Schmidt (2010) noted that this indicates a role for “noticing” when registering

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exemplars, and both explicit (aware) and implicit (unaware) processes of generalisation when constructions take on a more abstract meaning.

Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis has been considered within some theoretical frameworks in SLA (N. Ellis, 2005), particularly in relation to the distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge (discussed below). Moreover, his hypothesis was influential as it promoted other models of attention proposed by other researchers, as in Tomlin and Villa’s model discussed below.