A Study On Noticing Hypothesis In The Teaching And Learning Of Chinese As A Second Language

In recent years, with the rise of cognitive psychology, information processing theory and constructivism, research has gradually begun to focus on the psychological process of human cognition, namely, how we process external information and construct "new sc hema."In this environment, rounds of curriculum reform have accelerated a paradigmatic shift from teacher-centered to student-centered learning; however, teaching and learning m ethodologies have become major problems in the classroom and second-language teaching is not an exception. Second-language acquisition research tends to analyze leamerpsychol ogy and cognition as well as explore the second-language learning process and psycholog ical operation mechanism during the targeted content learning process.In relation to this, Schmidt, with his Portuguese-learning experience, poses the "notic ing hypothesis," claiming that noticing is a necessary, but insufficient, condition transform ing input into intake, and that learning without noticing is impossible. Through the effect ive classroom intervention of teachers, this approach aims to fully arouse learner attentio n, process targeted content, increase information storage transition from short-term to Ion g-term memory and eventually improve learning efficiency.Human pointing and centralizing external things is the beginning of all psychological activity. Ushinsk once observed that "’attention’is the only door in our mind which allo ws the entering of everything in consciousness." To put it simply, nothing in the outside world can obtain permanent storage in human long-term memory without attention. In t he second-language learning process, an important method for the student to effectively a bsorb language is input through attention. In classroom teaching, in order to ensure that the student effectively acquires targeted content, it is essential to maximally arouse the st udent’s attention. Only the information being noticed can get further processing, thus stor age transfer short-term to long-term memory, and eventually mastery.Based on the author’s teaching internship experience, this paper conducts experiment al research applying the "noticing hypothesis" to the teaching of Chinese characters. Thro ugh targeted character processing and effective classroom teaching intervention, the experi ment aims to arouse the attention of students and improve their learning effect to the gre atest possible extent. Both quantitative analysis of experimental data and qualitative analy sis of classroom observation, teacher interview results, the author found that under the g uidance of the "noticing hypothesis,"student attention in class significantly improved and the target character learning effect was substantial:1. completion of glyph memory;2. ac tively constructing a complete "character" schemata containing sound, meaning and glyph.This thesis is mainly divided into five chapters:Chapter one briefly overviews the research background, the practical significance and innovations of this study, the main research methods, and briefly introduces the overall framework of the paper.Chapter two reviews current research on the "noticing hypothesis," both at home an d abroad, and expounds upon its origin, definition, and also the six factors that affect t he "noticing hypothesis." In addition, the relationship between second-language acquisitio n and the "noticing hypothesis," as well as the foreign-language teaching strategies of C hinese characters are reviewed in this chapter.Chapter three explains in detail the character-teaching research and its implementatio n under the guidance of the "noticing hypothesis.’Chapter four presents specific analysis of the study results by means of quantitative and qualitative analysis. The former, through the post-test data, discusses the students’lea rning effects from the following three positions:contrasting the analysis of the character-acquisition effect between the new design and traditional methods as well as single target character acquisition effect analysis. The latter includes qualitative analysis from the aut hor’s classroom observations and teacher interview. In addition, this chapter briefly summ arizes the characteristics of using the noticing hypothesis.Chapter five provides a further summary of the research results as well as several s uggestions for applying the "noticing hypothesis" to teaching Chinese to the speakers of other languages. Finally, this paper points out the existing limitations.