Exploring The Role Of Noticing In English Writing In Senior Middle School

The importance of noticing as a cognitive process in second language acquisition has been increasingly recognized by applied linguistics researchers. This paper is to use noticing during the process of L2 writing, which takes three major steps: composing, comparing, re-writing. The research tries to observe the effect of noticing on the final written products by those participants, to see what kind of improvement occurs. Furthermore, it is also expected to find that through noticing L2 writer can not only improve their writing skills, but also their target language proficiency. In other words, noticing benefits the improvement of target language proficiency for L2 learners.Noticing is abstract and cannot be observed directly. The concept of language-related episodes is introduced as the reflection of noticing during the writing process. So the results are drawn from the analysis produced during the three stages. The study documents the relationship of noticing, both in the comparing stage and the reformulation stage to the improvement of the written product in the posttest of a three-stage writing task. Strategy of rewriting and think-aloud method is applied in the process of the empirical study. With think-aloud method, participants spoke out their mental activities during composing, comparing and re-writing. The think-aloud protocols are recorded with the help of audiotapes. Those language-related episodes are the focus of analysis, helping to find answers to research questions.The findings suggest that while composing and reformulation promote noticing, the quality of noticing, which relates directly to L2 writing improvement, is different for learners with different levels of L2 proficiency. We argue that while promoting noticing is important, promoting the quality of that noticing is a more important issue to be addressed in L2 writing pedagogy.The participants were all volunteers to participate in the experiments. Factors like levels of target language proficiency and writing task difference were taken into consideration in the result.