Attention and Awareness

Abstract

Attention and awareness are closely related concepts and can function in the environment for language learning at different levels. To begin with the concept of attention, a distinction needs to be made between two levels of attention, and the mechanisms regulating them, which will be important to the issues of language learning raised below. This distinction is between (1) perceptual attention to the numerous phenomena which we attend to automatically and involuntarily (during, for example, a conversation with a colleague), such as the room temperature or noises from the room next door, and (2) focal attention which is under some degree of voluntary executive control, such as the attention we pay to our colleague’s words and facial expressions while they are speaking and while we are trying to understand what they intend to communicate. Issues of how much, and also what quality of, attention to input is necessary for subsequent retention and learning are major topics of research in the broad field of cognitive psychology and in the content specific domain of second language acquisition (SLA). Although there have been claims in both these broad and narrower domains that nonattentional learning is possible, this almost always means learning without focal attention to the input stimuli, which selects them for further processing and encoding in memory. In such cases, simple detection of input at a stage of perceptual processing prior to selection is argued to contribute to learning. If this is so, then learning could be said to take place without awareness, since focal attention is widely argued to be a precondition for awareness (see Robinson, P. Attention and memory during SLA. In C. Doughty & M. H. Long (Eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 631–678). Oxford: Blackwell, 2003; Schmidt, R. Attention. In P. Robinson (Ed.), Cognition and second language instruction (pp. 3–32). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, for review). The necessity of awareness of input for SLA (or for other learning domains) is therefore more disputed than the claim that attention to input is necessary. Like attention, awareness can also be at a number of different levels, varying from what Schmidt (Appl Linguist 11:129–158, 1990) called “noticing” of elements of the surface structure of utterances in the input to those higher levels of awareness implicated in “understanding” metalinguistic rules and regularities which the surface structure elements conform to.