The Study Of 'Noticing' In Second Language Output

Over the past two decades, researchers in the field of second language acquisition, in the study of learner factors and the learning processes, have been increasingly aware of some concepts related with cognitive psychology, such as attention, awareness, memory etc, which is a branch of science rising in 1960s in western countries and flourishing currently as a main stream of psychology. Under this cognitive influence, teachers come to know that language learning is never a spectator sport, but firstly a self-directed cognitive process involving mostly the learners' active participation.Through years of teaching practice, the author finds there is a big gap in her students' language input and output. According to Schmidt (1990), there is a learning circle of input-intake-output, and input can't turn into output without intake. He claims there's a key element in the process from input to intake—'noticing', which is accessible to training so as to improve language output and learning. By reviewing related literatures, the author finds there're very few studies done in China about the effects of noticing training on language output, which could possibly provide solutions to the author's problem from teaching practice.In terms of this fact, the present research is an experimental study of noticing effects on second language output, involving 40 subjects of non-English major graduates from North West University, with both quantitative and qualitative approaches employed. The purpose is to testify the effects of noticing training on subsequent output. In addition, the author intends to find out what kinds of language forms learners would choose to notice and apply in subsequent output, and the influence of language proficiency differences on it. Results show that the second output of the experimental group with noticing training does outperform that of the control group; the subjects could notice the problems in comparing their inter-language and the target language and improve most of the items noticed in the subsequent output; and there do exist certain differences between subjects with higher language proficiency and those with lower proficiency.By carrying out this tentative research of the role of noticing in second language output, it's expected to help raise the teachers' consciousness in applying noticing strategy to their teaching practice. In addition, ELT in China could make use of the findings in relation to cognitive training to promote second language learning, and might work a new way out by employing discoveries and findings from other fields.