Noticing Hypothesis
Richard Schmidt's Noticing Hypothesis (1990, refined 1995, 2001) makes a single sharp claim: input does not become intake without conscious noticing. The hypothesis directly contradicts Krashen's position that acquisition is entirely subconscious, and it has become one of the most empirically productive ideas in SLA.
The Origin: Schmidt's Diary
The hypothesis grew out of Schmidt's own diary study of his Portuguese acquisition in Brazil. Tracking what he produced against what he remembered noticing in input, he found a striking correlation: forms he had consciously registered in conversation were the ones that began appearing in his speech. Forms he had been exposed to but not noticed remained absent from production. Schmidt & Frota's (1986) "Notice the Gap" paper formalized this observation into a testable claim.
The Claim
| Strong form | Weak form |
|---|---|
| Noticing is necessary for acquisition | Noticing is facilitative for acquisition |
| Without conscious registration, no input becomes intake | Acquisition can proceed without noticing, but more slowly and less reliably |
Most current research supports the weak form. Both versions agree that selective cognitive processing of input is acquisition-relevant; the disagreement is whether subjective awareness is strictly required.
Noticing vs Understanding
Schmidt (2001) carefully distinguished two levels of awareness, and the hypothesis applies to the lower level:
- Noticing = conscious registration of a specific form in input ("she said went, not goed")
- Understanding = recognition of the underlying rule or generalization ("irregular verbs don't take -ed")
Acquisition requires noticing, not understanding. Learners begin acquiring forms long before they can articulate the governing rule.
What the Hypothesis Predicts
- Frequency in input alone is insufficient: perceptual salience, instructional manipulation, and learner attention all mediate whether forms are noticed.
- Communicatively redundant forms (third-person -s, articles, plural marking on nouns already counted) are notoriously hard to notice and acquire late.
- Techniques that increase salience (input enhancement, input flooding, focus on form) should accelerate acquisition.
- Production matters partly because attempting to speak forces learners to notice the gap between what they want to say and what they can say (the link to the Output Hypothesis).
The Theoretical Stakes
The Noticing Hypothesis dismantles Krashen's non-interface position. If conscious noticing is required for input to become intake, then conscious processing is constitutive of acquisition, not merely a separate "learning" system that runs alongside it. This opens the door to a weak interface position: explicit instruction and form-focused activities work because they direct attention and increase the probability of noticing.
Challenges to the Hypothesis
- Tomlin & Villa (1994) distinguished three components of attention (alertness, orientation, and detection) and argued that detection without subjective awareness may be sufficient for acquisition. This challenges Schmidt's insistence on conscious awareness.
- Truscott (1998) argued that the hypothesis conflates noticing of form with noticing of meaning, and that evidence for the necessity of conscious awareness in grammar acquisition is thin.
- Implicit learning research (Williams 2005) has shown some learning effects without measurable awareness, suggesting the strong form is too restrictive.
- Methodological problem. Measuring noticing is hard: think-aloud protocols disrupt the very process being measured, and post-hoc reports may overestimate or underestimate awareness.
Schmidt's response in 2001 softened the strong form: he acknowledged that some learning may occur without awareness but maintained that more learning, of more types of features, occurs with awareness.
Classroom Implications
The hypothesis provides the rationale for a wide family of techniques:
- Input enhancement: bolding, underlining, color-coding target forms in written input
- Input flooding: saturating texts with high-frequency examples of the target structure
- Focus on Form: brief, reactive attention to form during meaning-focused tasks
- Consciousness-raising tasks: activities that ask learners to identify, sort, or analyze instances of a form
- Output-driven noticing: tasks where production surfaces gaps that learners then notice in subsequent input
References
- Schmidt, R. (1990). The role of consciousness in second language learning. Applied Linguistics, 11(2), 129–158.
- Schmidt, R. (1995). Consciousness and foreign language learning: A tutorial on the role of attention and awareness in learning. In R. Schmidt (Ed.), Attention and Awareness in Foreign Language Learning. University of Hawai'i Press.
- Schmidt, R. (2001). Attention. In P. Robinson (Ed.), Cognition and Second Language Instruction. Cambridge University Press.
- Schmidt, R. & Frota, S. (1986). Developing basic conversational ability in a second language. In R. Day (Ed.), Talking to Learn. Newbury House.
- Tomlin, R. & Villa, V. (1994). Attention in cognitive science and SLA. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 16(2), 183–203.