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DOI: 10.1177/1362168807077551

2007 11: 265Language Teaching ResearchPaul Mennim

Long-term effects of noticing on oral output

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Long-term effects of noticing on oral output

Paul Mennim Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan

This paper reports on the effects of classroom exercises that encourage noticing and

conscious attention to form, which were part of a university EFL oral presentation

course in Japan. The students on the course were given a set of exercises that

encouraged them to notice and to reflect on L2 forms of their own choosing

throughout one academic year. Records of their noticing were tracked throughout the

year and recordings of their oral output made over the same period were analysed to

determine whether there was any development in the use of the forms that the

students had noticed. The paper describes an initial analysis of the tracking of twostudents noticing and subsequent use of a non-count noun, which presented them

with difficulties at the start of the year. Nine months later their accuracy in the use of

this word was much improved. The paper considers how the studentsnoticing of the

word might have related to this improvement.

I Introduction

This study considers the outcome of a series of noticing exercises in a uni-versity presentation course in Japan. In this course, students, working ingroups, selected one topic to research for a whole academic year and gave

three oral presentations of their findings over that period. As they conductedtheir research, they came into contact with English in published material orthrough accessing the Internet, and in this way they were responsible for

their own selection of second language (L2) input. Although this was not alanguage courseper se (as I will describe below), I anticipated that the pro-

cess of both researching and presenting on a research topic in English would

help develop their L2 proficiency. I wanted to try to focus the students atten-tion on language forms as I had a good idea that they would want to know

that their English was as accurate as it could be before they made their publicperformance. I therefore set noticing exercises to increase the likelihood that

they would attend to linguistic form in both the input and in their own L2output. I hoped that this attention might then feed into the language learningprocess. In order to understand how this might come about, it will be help-

ful, before I describe the course in more detail, to consider the ideas of notic-ing and intake in second language acquisition theory and in classroomstudies.

Language Teaching Research 11,3 (2007); pp. 265280

2007 SAGE Publications 10.1177/1362168807077551

Address for correspondence: Paul Mennim, Aoyama Gakuin University, 4-4-25 Shibuya, Shibuyaku,

Tokyo 150-8366, Japan; email: [email protected]


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1 Noticing and intake

Noticing and intake describe processes that mediate between L2 input and adeveloping interlanguage system. Schmidt and Frota describe how learners

might notice input in the normal sense of the word, that is, consciously(1986: 311). Schmidt has refined his concept of noticing to account for inter-

language development that is not necessarily conscious but does requireattention. He describes (1990), for example, how most learners of French areunaware that there are phonological clues as to the gender of nouns, yet they

seem to make use of these clues when guessing noun gender. This ability maybe gained through all of their exposure to French nouns. The general pointhere is that focal attention is necessary for learning but conscious attention

is not. For Schmidt, intake is simply that part of the input that the learner

notices (1990: 139).Much of his early data came from his own efforts at learning Portuguese

(Schmidt and Frota, 1986). He spent five months in Brazil following a lan-guage course and at the same time he kept a journal describing what progress

he felt he was making in the language. This included new target structuresthat he heard or tried to use. In addition he was interviewed once a month on

tape and a Portuguese speaker examined the recordings to compare what hethought he had learnt with what he had actually learnt. He found a strong sim-ilarity between what he noticed in the input to what he was actually using

himself. The structures he noted in his diary as noticed structures began toappear in his speech. The input included his lessons and what he heard in

daily life. The study therefore provides some evidence that forms have to benoticed before they are used actively. Nevertheless, noticing was not suffi-cient as some forms appeared in his journal but did not emerge on the tapes

as part of his output. Even so, Schmidt makes strong claims for noticing(1990: 144): Those who notice most learn most, and it may be that those who

notice most are those who pay attention most, as a general disposition or onparticular occasions.

Noticing and intake are defined somewhat differently by Gass (1997), whopresents them as separate processes in a five-stage model of second languageacquisition, beginning with the apperception of input. Apperception is simi-lar to Schmidts idea of noticing. It represents some part of the input getting

through to the learner, perhaps due to recognition that the input represents agap in his or her interlanguage. Prior knowledge is one factor that might lead

to apperception of a language form; others include frequency or saliency inthe input. The stage between apperception and intake is comprehended input,which accounts for instances when a learner can comprehend the general

meaning of the input for the immediate purpose of communication but cannotprocess it any further, perhaps due to lack of time. In Gasss model, intake,

the third stage, represents a deeper analysis of L2 than Schmidts intake; it isthe stage at which learners analyse input, perhaps gaining an understandingof its syntactic structure. It is also here that generalizations and hypotheses

266 Long-term effects of noticing on oral output


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about the L2 are formed and tested. If further input confirms a hypothesis,which, as a consequence, becomes more securely integrated into the learners

interlanguage, then the fourth stage, integration, has been reached. The finalstage is output, the point at which newly acquired language is produced.

Although, ostensibly, this stage concludes the model, output, too, can feedinto the learning process, as we shall consider below.

II Noticing in the language classroom

This section looks at ways in which ideas about noticing and intake have been

investigated or utilized in the classroom.

1 Noticing oral outputSwain (2000) has argued that limited attention can prevent students from

noticing structures when they are speaking in the L2. Her students, quite rea-sonably, tended to focus on meaning during conversation and did not always

succeed in developing accuracy in the L2, in this particular case French.Returning to the model outlined above, we might say that although Swainsstudents were getting comprehended input, they were not always continuing

to the next stage of intake, the crucial stage for acquisition. Swains output

hypothesis (1995) proposes that, for the purposes of the development of

syntax and morphology, it is more beneficial for learners to use the L2actively rather than to listen to it. She argues for three functions of output.First is the question of noticing. When actively constructing L2 utterances,

learners may be more likely to notice gaps in their interlanguage, as, whenproducing output, they are pushed into syntactic processing to a greaterextent than is the case when they are attending to input. Noticing the gap

was alluded to above as a possible trigger of apperception. It is a term usedto describe learners reflection on the difference between what they them-

selves can or have said (or even what they know they cannot say) and what

it is more competent speakers of the target language say instead to conveythe same intention under the same social conditions (Doughty, 1999: 21).

The second function Swain attributes to output, analogous to Gasss idea thatoutput feeds back into the acquisition process at the level of intake, is the

chance it gives learners to test their hypotheses about the L2. Finally, outputprovides opportunities for conscious reflection about the L2, characterizedby metatalk: discussion about language form that may or may not include

explicit metalinguistic terminology. This third function is somewhat differ-ent from the first two, which could arise in natural speech. Metalinguistic

reference to oral output is more likely to arise in classroom situations whereit is required by a task.

Swain (1998) encouraged noticing in the classroom through the use of

Wajnrybs dictogloss (1991), which provides learners with the opportunity todiscover gaps in their L2 knowledge and to address them verbally. In the

Paul Mennim 267


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dictogloss, the teacher reads out a short passage once to the class who mustthen, working in groups, reconstruct it. In the process, the students are meant

to identify and discuss language problems and pool their linguistic resourcesto solve them. Swain calls this discussion negotiating about form, which is

manifested by language related episodes (LREs), defined as any part of adialogue in which students talk about the language they are producing, ques-tion their language use, or other- or self-correct (1998: 70). A crucial aspect

of LREs is that they are a product of the students attention directed towardstheir own L2 output.

This line of research has produced some evidence that the noticing of L2

forms can result in observable gains in the L2. Swain (1998) used the dic-togloss task to encourage the production of LREs. In a French immersion pro-

gramme, 13-year-old students were given a series of three dictogloss tasks to

complete and for the third one, their negotiation about form was recorded andanalysed. In order to evaluate the effect of this task on the students learning,

a post-test was produced for each group based on the language forms dis-cussed in the LREs. For example, two students were unsure about the gender

of the word rve in French and discussed this problem. They were thereforeasked the gender of this noun a week later in the post-test. Swain described astrong tendency (1998: 78) for students to respond correctly in the posttests

to questions about problem forms that they had correctly solved during thedictogloss task. A related effect was observed in that students who had solved

language problems in a non-target-like direction were likely to give the samenon-target-like answer in the post-test. This suggested that conscious reflec-tion about language form might be a source of language learning.

2 Noticing and learner autonomy

The effect of classroom discourse initiation on students noticing of languageforms was considered by Slimani (1989). She investigated uptake from what

learners claimed to have learnt from a series of grammar lessons. Uptake in

this study was what students noticed during a lesson in terms of grammar,vocabulary and pronunciation, recalled and reported in written question-

naires three hours after the lesson. Thus, it is similar to Gasss idea of apper-ception: part of the input that is noticed but may or may not be further

analysed as intake.Slimani found that a great deal of the topicality of the lesson (the gram-

mar structures, items of vocabulary or any other language forms covered in

the class) was rarely recalled as uptake from the evidence of forms and ques-tionnaires that were completed by the students after the class. Of the totalnumber of topics focused on during the lessons as much as 36% seemed

to go unnoticed. There were, however, more positive findings when sheanalysed the uptake of the topics initiated by the students themselves. Such

occasions were much less common than that teacher-initiated content, yet74% of language forms initiated by students during the lesson was confirmed



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as uptake in the questionnaires compared to just 49% of the forms introducedby the teacher.

Though the discourse initiation appears to be predominantly in the hands of the teacher,

it looks as if, given the chance, the informants benefit more from topics initiated by thelearners.

(Slimani, 1989: 227)

As to why student-initiated topicalization had a better chance of beingnoticed, Slimani suggests that the student contributions may have been

pitched at a more appropriate level to the learners interlanguage compared tothose of the teacher and may have been more relevant to their learning needs.

Insofar as this study reveals a decidedly limited role for the teacher in draw-

ing attention to language and a strong role for student autonomy in the poten-tial uptake of L2 forms, albeit in one particular setting, it suggests that allowing

students more freedom in attending to forms of their own choosing mightbetter result in apperception or intake.

This idea of student autonomy is relevant to natural order hypotheses inSLA (Pienemann, 1989), and a learners noticing of a form can be interpretedas a readiness to acquire it (e.g. Williams and Evans, 1998; Williams, 1999).

Despite this potential, teachers might be interested to know, before they beginto relinquish control of input in the classroom, to what extent learners by

themselves are able to notice and analyse the L2. While Schmidt was adept atnoticing language forms as he learned Portuguese, he is aware that, as he is atrained linguist, it might be objected that his metalinguistic awareness would

be far superior to that of non-specialist learners, who may have little aptitudefor noticing (Schmidt and Frota, 1986).

A study relevant to these concerns is that of Williams (1999), which inves-

tigated learner-generated attention to form, in this case LREs producedspontaneously (which means without the direction of the teacher) by eight

students aged between 18 and 25 in an intensive English programme, who

wore clip-on microphones as they completed a selection of classroom tasksand exercises such as role plays, correcting homework in pairs, grammar

activities and free conversation. The resulting 65 hours of taped dialogueyielded 268 LREs but Williams expresses disappointment with the amount

and range of students noticing, and questions whether the granting of auton-omy to students to initiate their own attention to form is worthwhile. Williams

judged that the students in her 1999 study did not spontaneously or consis-

tently attend to form (they averaged between three and seven LREs in a 45-minute session). In addition, the forms they did attend to were overwhelmingly

lexical (around 80% of LREs were lexically oriented). Williams concludesthat teachers cannot expect learners to consistently ferret out and notice mor-phosyntactic features (1999, p. 620).

Despite the low number of LREs reported by Williams, it may be possibleto develop classroom tasks and exercises that result in a greater amount of

Paul Mennim 269


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noticing and of a wider range of forms. Thornbury (1997), acknowledgingthat noticing is not guaranteed to take place in the language classroom, sug-

gests pedagogical interventions that might encourage it. His examples includescrutinizing the language of recorded conversations, having students proof

read texts or list notice the gap incidents in a journal.My study was motivated by the research cited above in the following ways.

First, it seemed that, taken together, the studies by Slimani and Williams

presented language teachers with a possible dilemma that although learner-initiated noticing may be beneficial to learning, it may not often occur in theclassroom. Because the course I was teaching gave students freedom to work

with their own choice of L2 input, I was keen to consider the efficacy of suchan approach. Second, I felt that noticing exercises that produced LREs might

be an effective way to give students feedback on their own output, as they can

result in a deep level of L2 analysis. Instead of input from a dictogloss, thelearners in this study scrutinized transcripts of their own presentations, while

I helped to correct any errors that appeared in them, as I describe below.

III The study

The study focuses on an academic presentation course for first-year studentsat a private Japanese university. The students were aged between 18 and 20,

and, as this course was designated upper level, they had TOEFL scores of500 or above, determined by the in house Institutional Testing Program ver-sion of that examination. The students were all enrolled in the Faculty of

Policy Studies and were not majoring in English; they followed courses insubjects such as law, economics, Asian studies and comparative culture. Theacademic presentation course was one of four compulsory English classes per

week. Students on this course researched a topic they were interested in, readabout this topic in English, discussed it with their peers and gave oral presen-

tations about their research. The duration of the course was nine months

(approximately 25 classes of 90 minutes each), during which time studentsgave three presentations in groups of two or three. The class size was rela-

tively small with 17 students.It is relevant to this study that the course objectives were not of a linguis-

tic nature; rather, they were drawn up in terms of appropriate preparation ofcontent, quality of research and organization. Class work included the consid-eration of information sources and presentation structure. Because the osten-

sible focus of this approach was successful research, it was not alwaysobvious to the students to what extent and in what ways their Englishimproved during this nine-month process. Even classes concentrating specif-

ically on oral skills do not always give students the chance to scrutinize theiroutput as would be the case with the written drafts of a composition class.

I therefore incorporated various noticing exercises, which aimed to focusthe students attention on L2 form.



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The noticing exercises encouraged students to notice both L2 input frominformation sources and their own L2 output (recordings of their presenta-

tions). The four core components of the course were as follows.

1 The presentation course

The students prepared three different presentations: one in Month 3 (10 min-utes), one in Month 4 (20 minutes) and a final presentation in Month 9 (30

minutes). This last presentation was preceded by a rehearsal in Month 8. TheMonth 3 presentation required the students to explain to the rest of the class

why they had chosen their topic, what they already knew and what theywanted to find out about it. The subsequent presentations would allow themto report on their actual research. These presentations were made without the

use of scripts, though the students were allowed to use small cue cards as anaide-mmoire.

The students completed several different exercises throughout the year that

encouraged noticing.

a Language development awareness (LDA) sheets: The students filledthese out every week. They were asked to write down any new language thatthey had noticed over the previous week. Categories helped to focus their

attention on different types of language form, such as grammar, vocabulary

and pronunciation.

b Post-presentation questionnaires: These helped focus the studentsattention on their own L2 output immediately after their presentations andafter the Month 8 rehearsal. The students were asked to report on the lan-guage they used in the presentation, including whether they realized that they

had made an error, whether they had managed to correct an error as theyspoke, or whether they used any new or recently learned language. Again, thequestionnaire was intended to focus their attention on different types of

language form.

c Transcription exercises: This was completed three times during theyear. The presentations and the rehearsal were recorded and the students wereasked to take their recording and transcribe approximately five minutes of

their own speech. For most students, this resulted in a double-spaced scriptcovering one side of A4 paper. They were encouraged to transcribe their

speech warts and all, even if they happened to notice errors while they madethe transcription. This would provide me with a clearer presentation of theerrors that they would spot later on, as the corrections were to be made in red

pen over the printed transcript. For the Month 3 and Month 7 transcriptionexercises they went on to correct these transcripts together in their groups.

The findings of a pilot study reported elsewhere (Mennim, 2003), suppliedencouraging evidence that a similar set of students were able to successfully

Paul Mennim 271


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correct errors working on their own. The students interactions as they dis-cussed language problems were recorded. The last stage was to pass their

completed work on to me. I added any corrections that they had missedand returned the scripts to them. Attention to form was therefore largely

unprompted by the instructor and allowed students to focus on whatever formsthey wanted to.

2 Selection and tracking of forms

Because the course was process oriented and did not present any set list of

forms for the students to learn, it was necessary to cast a wide net in thesearch for L2 gains. Progress could only be identified for those forms that

came up in the course of the students presentations and also with sufficient

regularity, so the study relied on a large quantity of recorded speech (approx-imately 100 minutes for each group of students). Although this methodology

required extensive analysis of recorded student output, I considered it worth-while insofar as it might be more likely to uncover the re-emergence and

development of language forms over the nine-month period.However, my starting point in tracking was not to trawl the presentation

transcripts to find L2 development, as I would be unable to speculate about

the source of every improvement found there. Rather, because my interestlay in what students had noticed, I began my search in the noticing data.

Only if an L2 form was noted or discussed there did I go on to trawl theoutput data to find subsequent re-emergences of that form. Of course, one ofthe inevitable restrictions associated with this procedure was that there was

no guarantee that forms noticed would ever re-emerge as output during thepresentations. I identified only seven examples where a noticed formappeared over 10 times in the presentation recordings (Mennim, 2005). I

considered this number of re-emergences high enough to make some deter-mination as to whether or not a students use of the form became more

target-like.

This paper focuses on one of these seven examples: the noticing and outputof two students appearing here under the pseudonyms Toru and Katsu, who

were researching the effects of garbage disposal on the environment.Although their noticing of language forms was considerable and diverse (they

produced 36 LREs during the Month 7 transcription exercise alone), for thepurposes of this paper, I trace their noticing throughout the year of one lan-guage form: the non-count noun garbage. The data shows that Toru noticed

the form at least three times and Katsu noticed it at least five times over theyear, as I will go on to illustrate. Because the idea of garbage disposal

remained at the centre of this pairs research throughout the year, the word re-emerged fairly often in the recorded data. Toru used it 13 times in the yearsthree presentations and one rehearsal, while Katsu used it 25 times over the

same period. Although there are many aspects involved in vocabulary acqui-sition (semantic properties, pronunciation, spelling and so forth), because my



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interest lies in the effect of the students own noticing, in what follows I trackonly that aspect of the word that they noticed and discussed themselves,

namely, whether or not it was grammatically countable. The word is of inter-est as both of the students had a problem with it at the start of the academicyear. In the Month 3 and Month 4 presentations, three out of Torus six uses

ofgarbage were non-standard as they related to countability, while seven outof Katsus 12 uses of garbage over the same two presentations were non-

standard in this way. (See Table 1.)In what follows, I track Toru and Katsus noticing throughout the year as

represented by the data from the classroom exercises, looking for evidence of

conscious reflection about this word. I then track re-emergences in theiroutput to see whether any improvement can be observed.

IV The tracking process

1 Initial noticing

It seems that the word was unknown to Toru until the start of the academicyear. In the first post-presentation questionnaire in Month 3, he cited garbagein the section: Did you use any new (recently learned) vocabulary?However, because he did not include the word in any of his weekly languagedevelopment awareness forms, it was uncertain how recently he had learnt it.

As for Katsu, in a LDA entry in Month 2, he noted:

I noticed garbagerubbishUS UK

It seemed that Katsu may have been aware of one or both of these wordsbefore, but, unlike Toru, it is not possible to tell from his remarks whether

garbage in particular had been recently learnt. What is more, although Katsu

has noticed something about the geographical spread of the words usage (afurther aspect of vocabulary acquisition), these first comments said nothing

about the grammatical behaviour ofgarbage, and, as mentioned above, theiruse of the word during the subsequent presentation in Month 3 provided noevidence that they were aware that it is non-count, although the above entry

may suggest such awareness. In terms of Gasss model of second languageacquisition, we might say that these first notes are evidence of either apper-ception or of comprehended input.

Paul Mennim 273

Table 1 Target-like and non-target-like occurrences of garbage in Month 3

and Month 4 presentations

Student /occurrence of form Toru Katsu

Garbage 3 5Garbages 3 7


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2 Grammatical reflection

As they made corrections to Katsus first presentation transcript in Month 3,the two students reflected for the first time on the grammatical behaviour of

garbage. The text in block capitals indicates where the students are readingverbatim from their presentation transcript. The question mark in turn 5 indi-cates one short inaudible section. The underlined text in turn 8 denotes stress.

Transcript 1: ONE DAY, HE VISITED TO JAPAN AND HE SAID, OH THERE ARE

MANY GARBAGES IN JAPAN

1 Katsu: ONE DAY, HE VISITED TO JAPAN AND HE SAID, OH THERE ARE

MANY GARBAGES garbages?

2 Toru: IN JAPAN you dont need to say that. Japan because he is

3 Katsu: Ah okay he is in Japan. garbages or garbage?4 Toru: garbage?

5 Katsu: I looked into the dictionary [?] garbages

6 Toru: you cant say that

7 Katsu: yeah you cant say that [garbage

8 Toru: [garbage like informations its like information

not informations

9 Katsu: yeah yeah

10 Toru: garbage.

Katsu first questions his use ofgarbages in turn 1. Torus attention is takenup with another point in turn 2, but Katsu repeats his query in turn 3. Torusanswer seems unsure as it is given with a questioning, high-rising terminal

intonation. In turn 5 Katsu mentions looking up this word in the dictionary.This particular recording is of poor quality and his whole statement is inaudi-

ble. It is likely that the lost comment is to do with the countability ofgarbageas he immediately agrees with his partner when he judges garbages unaccept-able in turn 6. It is interesting that Toru seems to lack the grammatical termi-

nology to describe this point, and instead uses the analogy with information

in order to make the point clear. This is nevertheless a clear example ofmetatalk.It seems from the above negotiation that the students had some awareness

that garbage is not a countable noun. It is not possible from my data to deter-

mine where this insight came from. As mentioned above, I did not offer anyinstruction or advice about this word. It is conceivable that, during their read-

ing about the topic in the L2 (as the course required them to do), they noticedthe form garbage when they would have expected to read garbages, and thismight have provided the negative evidence behind the doubts voiced in this

LRE. In the way that Katsu has used his dictionary to try to confirm or rejecthis hunch about the way garbage is used, this episode suggests that he is

refining his hypotheses about the way the word behaves and that the LRE ishelping him advance from the intake stage to the integration stage, accordingto Gasss model.



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3 Subsequent noticing

The next reference the students made to this word was in Month 4. In thepost-presentation questionnaire after his second presentation, Katsu made the

following short note in the section: Did you use any new (recently learned)grammar?

garbages garbage.

In fact, all three of Katsus uses ofgarbage in the presentation were standard.

A possible interpretation of this note is that he realized that he had managedto overcome this error in the Month 4 presentation. This is interesting as itsuggests that he had been conscious even of his target-like use of garbage.

Whereas noticing is often illustrated in terms ofnegative evidence and notic-

ing the gap, Katsu, consciously reflecting on his target-like performance,seemed to demonstrate a more positive form of noticing; that is, that he hadgained new knowledge, filling a previous gap in his L2. Katsus note there-fore gives a further indication that the countability of the form has been fur-

ther integrated into his interlanguage system.The students next noticed the word during the second transcription exercise

in Month 7 when they were correcting a transcript based on the second presen-

tation in Month 4. In the following segment, they are discussing Torus script.

Transcript 2: MANY GARBAGES THAT REPLACE OUR LIVING SPACE ANDENDANGER OUR LIFE

1 Katsu: garbage. Not s

2 Toru: ah no. garbage

3 Katsu: yeah

4 Toru: that replace our living space

5 Katsu: many garbage?

6 Toru: amount of amount of amounts of

7 Katsu: a lot of

8 Toru: hmm

9 Katsu: hmm because

10 Toru: its not uh

11 Katsu: We cannot we cannot say many? Many is not good in this sentence

12 Toru: amounts of maybe

13 Katsu: mm hmm

14 Toru: amounts of garbage that replace

This LRE is markedly different from the corresponding one in Month 3. Itseems clear that both students are now aware of the countability ofgarbage.

No discussion or justification of Katsus correction seems to be necessary; hesimply states that no s is needed and Toru immediately agrees. It is confirmedthat they realize they are dealing with the same grammatical form from turn

4, when they go on to change their choice of determiner to one that co-occurswith non-count nouns.

Paul Mennim 275


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The word attracted attention for the last time in the data in Month 8 afterthe rehearsal of their final presentation, which was to take place in Month 9.

The rehearsals were recorded so that the students could perform a final tran-scription exercise around their oral output. Due to a lack of time, the students

did not discuss their rehearsal output in groups; they simply made their tran-script and corrected it alone before handing it on to the teacher, who made afurther search for errors. Katsu made one alteration in his script from

garbages to garbage: the only occurrence of the error during the Month 8rehearsal. Meanwhile, there was no evidence that Toru noticed or attended tothis form during the same transcription exercise. His use of the word during

the rehearsal was always target-like. Neither student made reference to

garbage in the post-presentation questionnaire after the final presentation in

Month 9.

V Noticing and language development

We now consider the students developing use of this form over the

academic year from Month 3 to Month 9. Table 2 charts the students per-formance in terms of the number of times garbage is used in a standard ornon-standard way.

For Toru, the figures do not suggest any progress at all over Month 3 andMonth 4. In both months, he is as likely to use garbage incorrectly as cor-

rectly. However, his transcription exercise negotiation showed there wasprogress in terms of his declarative knowledge of the grammatical behaviourof the word. In Month 3, we saw from his use of an analogy with informa-tion that he was aware that garbage was a non-count noun. In Month 4, heconfirmed Katsus correction of one of his own non-target-like utterances of

garbage. Looking at the figures for the end of the course, with his attentionhaving been drawn to non-target-like occurrences of garbage twice in thetwo tape transcription exercises, his subsequent use of this word is always

target-like.


Table 2 Occurrences ofgarbagefrom Month 3 to Month 9

Toru Month 3 Month 4 Month 8 Month 9

Target-like 1 2 2 5

Non-target-like 1 2 0 0

Katsu Month 3 Month 4 Month 8 Month 9

Target-like 2 3 4 6

Non-target-like 7 0 1 2


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For Katsu, progress seems to have been less consistent. Although he wasaware that he produced only target-like occurrences of the word during the

Month 4 presentation, the next two recordings showed three examples of thenon-target-like garbages. This is interesting as Katsu was more inclined to

notice this word during the transcription exercises than Toru; Katsu initiatedboth of the LREs about garbage in Month 3 and Month 4. He also positivelyreported his own progress with this word in the post-presentation question-

naire in Month 4. It might therefore have been thought more likely that Katsuwould have eradicated the error. However, a non-linear pattern in grammati-cal acquisition has long been observed in second language acquisition stud-

ies, so it does not follow that increased declarative knowledge of an L2 formwill guarantee target-like use during real time communication. But in any

case, Katsu clearly made progress in his target-like use ofgarbage over the

year. Table 3 shows more clearly how the mostly non-target-like occurrencesat the beginning of the course became mostly target-like towards the end. This

applies to both of the students.

VI Conclusions

There was evidence that although the students had some knowledge of themeaning of the word garbage at the start of their presentation course, they

were unable to use it in a grammatically target-like way as a non-count noun.However, by the end of the year, their increased accuracy in its use in this waysuggests a long-term gain in language learning.

The long-term nature of this study is important to the evaluation of thenoticing exercises employed in the course. This 9-month time period is inmarked contrast to the typically short-term cross-sectional nature of other

studies in this area. For instance, in my pilot study, cited above, I observed theeffects of noticing over just two weeks. Similarly, Swains 1998 study, also

cited above, involved a post-test one week after the final dictogloss. This study

suggests that it has taken time for the students progress to show itself. Hadthe analysis of the students use ofgarbage ended in Month 4, much of Torus

eventual improvement would have gone unobserved. Although it was alreadyclear in Month 3 that Toru possessed the declarative knowledge necessary to

solve the problem of the countability ofgarbage, consistent proceduralizationof this knowledge was only observable towards the end of the year. His use ofthe form was target-like just 50% of the time in the Month 4 presentation, yet

the Month 8 rehearsal and Month 9 presentation show a 100% accuracy rate.This was despite the fact that the only evidence of his attention returning tothat form was a very brief correction during the Month 7 transcription exer-

cise; this correction may have been a sufficient reminder of his use ofgarbageto get him back on the right track. On the other hand, the fact that Katsu

reverted to garbages twice in the Month 9 presentation suggests that languageproblems can take a considerable time to be fully eradicated.

Paul Mennim 277


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Table 3 Occurrences and accuracy ofgarbagethroughout year

Toru Accuracy Month

1 high consciousness about garbage problems 3

2 people threw their garbages away X 3

3 if there are many garbages that replace X 4

4 there are too much garbages that X 4

5 wait for the garbage weve already made 4

6 throw it into the garbage can! 4

7 environmental distress caused by garbage and other 8

8 Japanese consciousness about garbage is low 8

9 through the garbage and economy research. 9

10 the future for garbage problem. 9

11 we are interested in garbage problem 9

12 space for garbage disposal 9

13 to throw garbage away as much as we want 9

Katsu Accuracy Month

1 reduce the quantities ofgarbages we think X 3

2 hardly as much as garbage in Japan. 3

3 There are many garbages in Japan. X 3

4 his country has garbage garbages but X 3

5 environmental problem caused by garbages. X 3

6 thoughts about garbages equal to our visions X 3

7 Why is full of garbages in Japan? Where does it come X 3

8 in the world forever uh garbage will be produced 3

9 especially eh about garbages. And so our topic X 3

10 this mans vision and thoughts about garbage resemble 4

11 oh, there is a lot ofgarbage in Japan. And then, 4

12 Why is it full ofgarbage in Japan? Eh where does it come 4

13 he was so amazed at the quantity ofgarbage. Then 8

14 environmental problem caused by garbages. X 8

15 in which we throw away garbage. Uh because of 8

16 er this mans vision and thoughts about garbage equal to 8

17 Why is Japan full ofgarbage? Where does it come from? 8

18 he was so amazed at the quantity ofgarbage. Then he 9

19 environmental problems caused by garbage. 9

20 declamation in which we throw away garbage. 9

21 this mans vision and thoughts about garbage 9

equal our vision

22 damage caused by garbages and other poisonous X 9

waste

23 the technology ofgarbage disposal developed and the 9

24 when we throw away these garbages ah we must pay X 925 why is Japan full ofgarbage? Eh-where does it come from? 9


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It is worth restating that the students made their own decisions about whichforms to attend to during the exercises used in this course. With regard to the

transcription exercises, given the teachers partial relinquishing of classroomcontrol, there was always the risk that the students would be unable to scruti-

nize their transcripts effectively, perhaps due to a lack of confidence or toface-saving issues associated with criticizing other students output. But thetime they spent in their groups seems to have been well spent. Toru and Katsu

discussed 36 LREs over 20 minutes during the Month 7 transcription exer-cise, while the initial analysis of just some of those showed that, for theseadult learners at least, it provided opportunities to notice the gap and to dis-

cuss and verbalize hypotheses about the L2. Of course, whether this would beobserved in different student populations remains uncertain.

The nature of the data collection carried certain risks, as there was no guar-

antee that any form would emerge with sufficient regularity to provide a clearpicture of L2 gains. In fact, though, the number of occurrences ofgarbage (13

by Toru and 25 by Katsu) made it possible to make reasonable claims abouthow that form developed over the year. However, the fact that the students

were required to stay with the same research topic over the year helped ensuresome repetition of lexical items at least. But one further factor in Toru andKatsus presentations resulted in more recycling of language forms compared

to those of the other groups; at the start of each of their talks they gave a briefreview of their previous presentations. In hindsight, this element would have

represented a potentially useful requirement for all of the groups. The repeti-tion of the review may have resulted in repeated noticing of forms and per-haps in greater accuracy in the use of those forms, as was the case in studies

of task repetition reported by Bygate (1996), Gass et al. (1999) and Lynchand Maclean (2001).

Finally, the sequence of noticing that is followed here is just one of severalappearing in my data, which record the noticing of 17 students over thecourse of the academic year. A more extensive study of the classroom data

sampled here (Mennim, 2005) offers a deeper and more extensive analysis of

the variety of forms that attracted the students attention and reports furthertracking of re-emergences of those forms, showing more evidence of long-

term L2 gains, attributable to noticing.

VII References

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