| With the fast development of international intercourse, more and more people begin to learn a second language. It seems that mastering a second language has become a must. Therefore, in recent years, the field of second language learning has been the focus of many linguists and teachers. They have tried to study second language learning from different perspectives with a view to discover efficient ways to help learners acquire a second language. Consciousness is originally a psychological concept. In this thesis, we apply this concept to the study of second language learning from the perspective of cognitive psychology, hoping to bring a fresh vigor to the field of second language learning. This thesis is to explore the role of consciousness in second language learning.In addition to an introduction and a conclusion, the thesis consists of three chapters.Chapter One mainly elaborates the concept of consciousness and theoretical foundations of consciousness. Consciousness is difficult to define. We study consciousness from a viewpoint of cognitive psychology. In this paper, consciousness may be defined as awareness, intention and knowledge respectively. Having a comprehensive understanding of the concept of consciousness will do well to the subsequent study. The second part of this chapter deals with the theoretical foundations of consciousness, which is made up of two parts: attention, and theory of consciousness——Human Information Processing.Attention is another very important concept in our present study. More than a hundred years ago, William James (1980) studied attention and his definition of attention is still popular among psychologists. Attention also plays a role in second language learning. Most psychological models of memory hold that the allocation of attention is the necessary and sufficient condition for encoding a stimulus into long-term memory and the efficient retrieval depends on both the quality and quantity of attention at the time of encoding. Attention is also the necessary condition for input to become intake that is available for further mental processing.The basic postulate of information processing theory is that humans are limited capacity processors of information (Mclaughlin et al, 1983; Posner & Klein, 1973). The notion of consciousness in information processing theory is associated in one way or another with this notion of a limited capacity system. Consciousness is crucial in the information processing theory.Chapter Two is the main part of this thesis, which discusses the role of consciousness in second language learning and gives experimental evidence.In this part, we study Gass's Framework for SLA first. Gass (1997) distinguished five stages to account for the conversion of input to output: (1) apperceived input (2) comprehended input (3) intake (4) integration and (5) output. VanPatten (1998) makes it clear that input processing is how learners attend to incoming linguistic data and how they make connections between form and meaning. He proposed three useful principles. Schmidt (1990) has proposed the "Noticing Hypothesis" which has acknowledged the role of consciousness in language learning and argued that learners must first consciously "notice" some particular form in the input before any subsequent processing of that form can take place. In other words, noticing is the necessary and sufficient condition for the conversion of input to intake for learning. Schmidt argued strongly against any intake of input that the learner has not noticed. He also pointed out several factors influencing noticing, namely, (1) frequency (2) saliency (3) instruction (4) processing ability (5) readiness and (6) task demands. We provide some evidence to support our findings.Chapter Three is the last part of this thesis, on the basis of foregoing theories and models, we first propose a suggested model for foreign language learning and then give some pedagogical implications related to the model.A synthetic and comprehensive model is proposed on the basis...
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