A Comparative Study of Noticing between L1 and L2 Writing Processes of EFL Learners from Japan and China
Geng Bing
D13LC302
Graduate School of Literature and Human Sciences
Osaka City University
2016 Abstract
In the recent years, it has become increasingly popular to explore the psychological process of language acquisition. Researchers have divided the psychological process into three stages: attention, consciousness and noticing.
As for attention and consciousness, there have been numerous articles and books concerning to them, and the research in this area has yielded rich fruit.
Regarding the research related to noticing—the most complicated psychological process—there seems to be very little. Some of this research has even come to a confusing conclusion. This dissertation is centered on the study of noticing, especially noticing happening in L1 and L2 writing. The main contents include illustrating the nature of noticing and noticing in L2 writing, comparing the different noticing aspects between L1 and L2 writing processes, exploring its neural basis in the brain and obtain some enlightenment on the teaching methods of L2 writing.
Schmidt first put forward noticing hypothesis (1995, 2001), which succeeded in achieving mainstream status in SLA research. The heart of the noticing hypothesis was the claim that only those parts of the input that the learner noticed actually become available for intake and effective processing.
The effective implicit learning could not occur without explicitly creating the initial mental representation of a new stimulus. The noticing theory was in complete accordance with the “explicit/declarative first, implicit/procedural second” assumption, which had been supported by Robinson and so on. From
1 Schmidt’ s viewpoint, we can get the conclusion that noticing equals to attention. However, for this point, some scholars have different viewpoints.
Shirahata (1999) and so on believed that noticing was not equal to attention nor did it belong to a part of attention. Attention is a preparatory stage of consciousness, in which the competitive input is selected and paid attention to and then waits to be processed in consciousness. On the other hand, noticing is not a simple process of paying attention to the input, but a much more complicated cognitive process. It is to achieve a final adjustment of language.
This adjustment leads to reduce the interference of L1 on L2 and produce L2 output as accurately and naturally as possible. It usually involves improving pronunciation and intonation, modifying spellings and grammatical mistakes, adjusting and integrating sentence structures and meanings, reorganizing paragraphs and even the whole content. This viewpoint of noticing is taken as the theoretical basis in this dissertation.
The study of L2 writing has been one of the most widely explored aspects recently. However, study of noticing in L2 writing was very similar to that of attention under the influence of noticing hypothesis, and the role of noticing in both L1 and L2 writing processes was also neglected. Therefore, the most important content of this dissertation is to study the different aspects noticing appears between L1 and L2 writing processes. During the L1 and L2 writing processes, noticing can be clearly reflected in two revising stages including self-revision and adviser revision. The experiment is based on a think-aloud writing test, which is designed as follows: Fifty-eight college
2 students are chosen as the participants, twenty-nine Japanese and twenty-nine
Chinese students respectively. The experiment is carried out one by one as follows: First, the participant is required to write a Japanese/Chinese composition and an English composition separately with the given topics in the fixed time. Then he/she is given some time to revise his/her compositions by himself/herself. Subsequently, a teacher revises his/her compositions, giving some advice to him/her. Finally, the participant completes his/her compositions both in Japanese/Chinese and English. The writing and revising processes are recorded as well. Two different kinds of materials are collected to analyze noticing. First, the written products are analyzed from three aspects: Meaning,
Discourse and Form. Second, the recorded data is used to deeply explore the reasons why noticing happens differently in the two writing processes psychologically. From the analysis, we obtain the following conclusions.
For the self-revision, Japanese noticing to Meaning ranks the first in both
L1 and L2 writing, but focuses on different aspects. In L1 writing, self-revision focuses on the sentences. In L2 writing, self-revision focuses on the words.
That is to say, the participants take more notice of the sentence processing in
L1 writing, and the word processing in L2 writing. However, the Chinese students notice Meaning first in L1 writing and notice almost the same between
Meaning and Form in L2 writing.
For the adviser revision, both the Japanese and Chinese teachers give some general suggestions about Meaning without any comment on Form which means that in L1 writing, only Meaning is the key point to be noticed by the
3 adviser. In L2 writing, the teachers notice not only the sentence and word processing in the revising process of Form but also the idea, the whole structure, and the process of argumentation in the revising process of Meaning as they do in L1 writing.
Through the analysis of L2 revising data, we have the following considerations. In Japanese, L2 proficiency is assumed to be a very important element to influence the ability of noticing. The participants are still likely to notice Meaning in the L2 writing and revising processes. However, in comparison with Japanese, Chinese tend to notice Form more. Only two participants with Level A notice Meaning, and the others all notice Form.
The difference in noticing in revision between Japanese and Chinese may come from the different language systems. Japanese has complex grammatical variations of words and structures, which is similar to English, and the writers are likely to notice meanings in L2 writing more. On the other hand, Chinese has complex expressions of meaning with less variations of words and structures, which is very different from English, and the writers tend to notice forms in L2 writing more.
From the neurolinguistics’ view, noticing in the brain usually happens after consciousness during the working memory system in Central Executive.
The brain initially pays attention to all the input information, seperates the integral information into several small parts to check if unconformity or mistakes might exist through self-initiated trigger and other-initiated trigger.
Then, the brain begins to adjust and integrate the processed information,
4 generating the new and accurate output information finally. Besides, some researchers have recently put forward that noticing can also be explained from the viewpoint of unconsciousness. E.g. we can detect some of our errors without being conscious. In an eye movement task, when the participants’ eyes deviate from the plan, the error triggers an activation of the executive control centers in the anterior cingulate cortex—even when participants are unaware of the error and deny that their eyes wandered off the target. In L2 writing, unconscious noticing also happens in some revising parts.
Finally, from all the analysis of this study, we can obtain great enlightenment on the teaching methods in L2 writing. First, pre-writing instruction is an indispensable process at the beginning of L2 writing teaching.
The teacher could guide the students to form good writing habits such as considering audience and purpose. Second, L1 writing ability is assumed to be a very important premise to improve L2 writing ability. Doing more L1 writing tasks helps to improve L2 writing ability. Third, in the writing class, the teacher could lend some teaching methods of L1 writing, develop the students’ L2 thinking, and guide them to form the complete sense of noticing in writing. In addition, the teacher should help the students to improve their noticing with sentence processing, shifting noticing from words to sentences, furthermore, from Form to Meaning. Besides, adviser revision also seems to be an indispensable way to help the students improve their noticing ability. The teacher could make all kinds of adviser revising activities to stimulate the students’ inner noticing motive.
5 In a word, since the insufficiency still remains, the present study does not attempt to draw any generalization but only bears a purpose of stimulating future research in the L2 writing field with integration of the research fruits in
Second Language Acquisition.
Key words: Noticing, Attention, Consciousness, L1 writing, L2 writing,
L2 proficiency, Self-revision, Adviser revision
6 Acknowledgments
Looking back at the four-year doctoral study in Osaka City University, I have harvested treasures of my life with my dissertation: my lifelong guider—Professor Ikari—and friendship and love from many people. I felt myself truly fortunate to have guidance, illumination, encouragement, and support from the very beginning of my study to the completion of this dissertation.
First and foremost, I would like to express my greatest gratitude to my thesis supervisor, Professor Ikari, not only for his expert supervision, supportive and thoughtful comments, but also for his consistent encouragement, understanding, and patience throughout the process of my study.
I am also thankful for the valuable suggestions, especially encouragement from the other experts in my major: Professor Yamazaki, Professor Tanaka, and
Professor Seki.
Many words of gratitude should be paid to all the people who helped me with or participated in the empirical experiment. Particularly, I thank Professor
Tanaka, Mr. Isobe, and Ms. Omae who assisted me to conduct the experiment.
Besides, my heartfelt thanks go to 29 students from Osaka City University and
29 Chinese university students, who enthusiastically participated in the main study．
Other people also live in my lifelong memory. Miss Zengni, Miss Weiwei,
Miss Zhang Tianyi and Miss Caorui helped me greatly in trying out many times
7 of test before the experiment, and dealt with many tasks for me when I was not in Osaka. They also shared their joys and sorrows with me. I owe them greatly.
Other friends— Dr. Wang Lili, Dr. Wang Yanping, Dr. Limin, Miss Yujing, Ms.
Lin Lanjuan—have also made my stay in Osaka unforgettable．
Finally, I cannot thank my family enough for their unconditional backup and endless love. My wise father—Geng Xiangchao—and laborious mother—Wu Shuxian—supported and pushed me forward in my study and also tried their best to take care of my baby while I was away studying.
Last but not least, I thank my husband—Sulei—for his tremendous support both spiritually and financially. Without him, I could not have accomplished my doctorate study. Worthy of more than any academic degree, my little daughter—Su Peiqi—was and will be an everlasting inspiration in my research and career life．
8 Table of Contents
Abstract...... 1
Acknowledgments...... 7
Table of Contents...... 9
List of Figures...... 15
List of Tables...... 16
Chapter 1 Introduction...... 18
1.1 Context of the problem...... 18
1.2 Research questions and purpose...... 20
1.3 Significance of the study...... 21
1.4 Organization of the dissertation...... 23
Chapter 2 Study of Noticing...... 25
2.1 Noticing hypothesis...... 25
2.1.1 Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis...... 25
2.1.1.1 Origins of the noticing hypothesis ...... 25
2.1.1.2 Individual difference between noticing and awareness ...... 35
2.1.1.3 Noticing and attention...... 41
2.1.1.4 Conclusion...... 43
2.1.2 Robinson’s study ...... 44
2.1.3 Dörnyei’s study...... 46
2.2 Different views on noticing...... 48
2.2.1 Shirahata’s study...... 48
2.2.2 Ikari’s study...... 49
9 2.2.3 Yamadori’s study...... 50
2.2.4 Types of noticing...... 51
2.2.4.1 Noticing in written English...... 51
2.2.4.2 Keller’s noticing...... 52
2.2.4.3 Noticing observed in overregularization ...... 52
2.2.5 Stages of noticing...... 54
2.2.5.1 First stage of noticing...... 54
2.2.5.2 Second stage of noticing...... 54
2.2.5.3 Third stage of noticing...... 55
2.2.6 Mechanism of the psychological process of L2 acquisition...... 56
2.3 Chapter summary...... 56
Chapter 3 Study of L2 Writing and Noticing in L2 Writing……...... 58
3.1 Study of L2 writing...... 58
3.1.1 L2 writing research...... 59
3.1.2 Major models of writing...... 60
3.1.2.1 Flower and Hayes’s model...... 60
3.1.2.2 Bereiter and Scardamalia’s dual system...... 63
3.1.2.3 Kellogg’s model of working memory in writing ...... 65
3.1.2.4 Comments...... 68
3.2 Influencing factors of L2 writing ability...... 71
3.2.1 L1 writing expertise...... 72
3.2.2 L2 proficiency...... 79
3.2.3 L2 writing in the EFL context...... 83
3.2.4 Comments...... 84
3.3 Study of noticing in L1 and L2 writings...... 91
3.3.1 Swain’s Output Hypothesis...... 91
10 3.3.2 The psychological mechanism of noticing in L1 writing...... 98
3.3.3 The role of noticing in L2 writing...... 99
3.3.4 Comments...... 101
3.4 Specific research cases on noticing in L2 writing...... 103
3.4.1 Swain and Lapkin’s case...... 103
3.4.2 Qi and Lapkin’s case...... 104
3.4.3 Hanaoka’s case...... 104
3.4.4 Cumming and Griffin’s case...... 105
3.5 Specific research cases on noticing in other aspects of L2
acquisition...... 106
3.5.1 Diary entries...... 106
3.5.2 Questionnaire responses...... 107
3.5.3 Immediate and delayed retrospection...... 107
3.5.4 Summary...... 108
3.6 Chapter summary...... 109
Chapter 4 Research Design and Data Analysis...... 110
4.1 Research design...... 110
4.1.1 Hypothesis...... 110
4.1.2 Participants...... 110
4.1.3 Instruments...... 111
4.1.4 Data collection procedure: Think-aloud protocols ...... 115
4.1.5 Evaluating Standard...... 116
4.2 Data analysis...... 117
4.2.1 Revising data in L1 writing ...... 118
4.2.1.1 Revising data in L1 writing from Japanese ...... 118
4.2.1.2 Revising data in L1 writing from Chinese ...... 123
11 4.2.1.3 Summary...... 126
4.2.2 Revising data in L2 writing ...... 128
4.2.2.1 Revising data in L2 writing from Japanese ...... 128
4.2.2.2 Revising data in L2 writing from Chinese ...... 134
4.2.2.3 Summary...... 138
4.3 Data supplement ...... 140
4.3.1 Participants...... 141
4.3.2 Analysis...... 141
4.3.2.1 Revising data in L1 writing...... 141
4.3.2.1.1 Revising data in L1 writing from Japanese...... 141
4.3.2.1.2 Revising data in L1 writing from Chinese...... 143
4.3.2.1.3 Summary...... 145
4.3.2.2 Revising data in L2 writing...... 145
4.3.2.2.1 Revising data in L2 writing from Japanese...... 145
4.3.2.2.2 Revising data in L2 writing from Chinese...... 147
4.3.2.2.3 Summary...... 149
4.4 Result of data analysis from the two experiments...... 150
4.5 Chapter summary...... 152
Chapter 5 Insight into Noticing...... 154
5.1 Analysis of noticing in L2 writing ...... 154
5.1.1 Quantitative analysis...... 154
5.1.2 Qualitative analysis...... 155
5.2 Aspects of noticing in L1 and L2 writings...... 159
5.3 Influence of L2 proficiency on noticing...... 161
5.4 Neural basis of noticing in the brain...... 163
5.4.1 Consciousness and working memory...... 163
12 5.4.2 Noticing in the brain...... 164
5.4.2.1 Noticing in cerebrum and cerebellum...... 164
5.4.2.2 Noticing generation—syntactical processing...... 166
5.4.3 Unconscious noticing...... 172
5.5 Chapter summary……………………………………………………...... 176
Chapter 6 Enlightenment on Teaching L2 Writing...... 178
6.1 Discussion on revision—written feedback...... 178
6.2 Theories of teaching L2 writing...... 181
6.3 Practices of teaching L2 writing...... 184
6.3.1 Practice under the current-traditional rhetoric view...... 184
6.3.2 Practice under the expressive view...... 184
6.3.3 Practice under mixture of product-and process-oriented writing
instruction…………………………………………..………………185
6.4 Methods of teaching L2 writing...... 185
6.5 Future objective………………………………………………………….186
6.6 Chapter summary...... 187
Chapter 7 Findings, Implications, Limitations and Suggestions...... 189
7.1 Major findings...... 189
7.2 Implications...... 191
7.2.1 Theoretical implications...... 191
7.2.1.1 Broadening the scope of study on noticing in SLA………...... 191
7.2.1.2 Urging for a reexamination of the existing theories of
writing….………………………………………..………….....192
7.2.1.3 Improving the understanding of theories of teaching L2
writing...... 193
13 7.2.2 Pedagogical implications...... 194
7.2.2.1 Instruction in pre-writing period...... 194
7.2.2.2 Individual diagnosis and intervention in developing L2
writing…...... 194
7.2.2.3 Meta-knowledge………………….…………………………….195
7.2.2.4 Different classroom activities…………………………………..195
7.2.2.5 Feedback………………………………………………………..196
7.3 Limitations...... 196
7.4 Suggestions for future research...... 197
7.5 Chapter summary ...... 199
Bibliography...... 200
Appendix A...... 230
Appendix B...... 234
Appendix C...... 238
Appendix D...... 242
14 List of Figures
Figure 1……………………………………………………………………....50 Figure 2………………………………………………………………………56 Figure 3………………………………………………………………………62 Figure 4………………………………………………………………………64 Figure 5………………………………………………………………………65 Figure 6………………………………………………………………………66 Figure 7………………………………………………………………………66 Figure 8…………………………………………………………………..…174 Figure 9………………………………………………………………..……176
15 List of Tables
Table 1……………………………………………………………….…….....110 Table 2……………………………………………………………….…...... 111 Table 3……………………………………………………………….……….117 Table 4………………………………………………………………………..118 Table 5……………………………………………………………………...... 123 Table 6………………………………………………………….……....….....127 Table 7………………………………………………………..………....…....127 Table 8……………………………………………………………………..…128 Table 9……………………………………………………………………...... 128 Table 10…………………………………………………………………...... 134 Table 11……………………………………………………………………....134 Table 12……………………………………………………………………....139 Table 13………………………………………………………………..……..139 Table 14……………………………………………………………….……...141 Table 15………………………………………………………………………141 Table 16……………………………………………………………………....142 Table 17………………………………………………………………….…...143 Table 18……………………………………………………………………....145 Table 19……………………………………………………………….……...145 Table 20………………………………………………………………….…...146 Table 21………………………………………………………………….…...147 Table 22…...... …………………………………………………….……...147 Table 23………………………………………………………………………149 Table 24…………………………………………………………………...….149 Table 25...... 151 Table 26...... 151
16 Table 27...... 152 Table 28...... 154 Table 29...... 155 Table 30...... 155 Table 31...... 155 Table 32...... 156 Table 33...... 156 Table 34...... 156 Table 35...... 156 Table 36…………………………………………………………………..…..157 Table 37……………………………………………………………..……..…157 Table 38………………………………………………………………………157
17 Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Context of the problem
Many language instructors recognize the complexities involved in acquiring native-like writing competency in a second language, given the similar difficulties related to the development of L1 writing competency
(Whalen and Manard, 1995)．But L2 writing is a much more demanding task for a majority of ESL/EFL (English as Second Language/English as Foreign
Language) students at all levels because of various additive variables from the cognitive aspect such as lack of an appropriate composing process, the effective aspect such as negative experience from instruction and evaluation of writing (Lee, 2005), and linguistic constraint of proficiency (Kroll, 2003).
Classical models dominating both L1 and L2 writing studies (e.g. Flower and Hayes, 1981; Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1987; Kellogg, 1996) regard writing as a complex and recursive problem-solving process, which involves thinking under the monitoring of the central executive control. In this problem-solving process, writers are assumed to manipulate the sub-processes and their corresponding mental representations by using various strategies to work out what one wants to achieve with the text and then decide how to do it step by step. As writing is considered a problem-solving activity, these models regard problem-solving strategies as the essential features of writing expertise.
Research on L2 writing process has developed on the basis of theories and studies on L1writing process. Accordingly, a majority of empirical studies on
L2 writing process attempt to discover the strategies that good and/or poor L2
18 writers employ (Cumming, 1989; Vann and Abraham, 1990), compare the different strategies used by skilled or unskilled L2 writers (Raimes, 1985;
Pennington and So, 1993) or by L1 and L2 writers (Jones and Tetroe, 1987;
Whalen and Manard, 1995), and to reveal the similarities and/or differences between the writing processes of the two languages. Even though the endeavors as to revealing strategy use in writing process is admittedly crucial for understanding the nature of writing, in comparison with the relatively abundant findings on this focus, the central executive or monitor component that supervises and controls the on-line scheduling of them has not received much attention. Questions as to how the central executive monitors the writing processes, and what factors influence the monitoring all beyond the interest of these models and the overwhelming body of empirical studies. To put it another way, they leave some major questions unanswered, for example, that of what happens in the thinking process that causes the writer to determine the use of certain strategies.
In cognitive psychology, it is widely acknowledged that the central executive functions in the thinking process by monitoring the allocation of attentional resources. Paying attention means selectively concentrating on one aspect of the environment while ignoring other things. Relating attention to the writing process, we may suggest that the problem-solving process involves the writer’s choice of selecting what aspects of writing to be attended to and how they are to be dealt with. Therefore, one step before the use of strategies is the writer’s allocation of attention. The role of attention in both Ll and L2 writing
19 processes has been a neglected area of investigation before. Therefore, many studies are called for to relate the psycholinguistic process of L2 writing with theories of attention in SLA in order to reveal how writers operate their attentional resources and how their attention causes the use of strategies, which has made great progress.
In recent years, with the development of cognitive science, an increasing number of researchers have shown great interest in the psychological process of language acquisition and put forward the different concept. According to the latest research in cognitive psychology, the psychological process of language acquisition can be divided into three stages: attention, consciousness, and noticing (Dörnyei, 2008). Up until now, researchers have made great progress in the study of attention and consciousness such as being described above, which is very helpful for us to know clearly and deeply about the working mechanism of the brain. However, there seems to be much less research related to noticing. In fact, some research in noticing has even caused some confusion with the meaning of the terms ‘attention’ and ‘noticing’. Therefore, we need to further explore this underdeveloped academic field of the most advanced psychological process, noticing, in order to grasp a complete picture of psychological process of language acquisition and its corresponding brain function.
1.2 Research questions and purpose
Two questions are mainly discussed in this article: the nature of noticing
20 and its different aspects in L1 and L2 writing. During the L1 and L2 writing processes, noticing can be clearly reflected in two revising stages including self-revision and adviser revision. The whole research focuses on the study of noticing in both L1 and L2 writing processes (two revising stages), tries to illustrate the nature of noticing, distinguish noticing from attention, divide noticing into different steps, compare the different noticing aspects between self-revision and adviser revision, and furthermore, explore the neural basis of noticing in the brain. The result of this research helps to explore some valuable and effective methods of teaching in L2 writing.
1.3 Significance of the study
Noticing has been studied more and more in recent years since it is different from attention and another complex cognitive process—consciousness. It is also a key to process L2 in the brain. Noticing can be divided into conscious noticing and unconscious noticing, and the noticing discussed in this dissertation mainly refers to conscious noticing. The importance of noticing lies in that it can integrate the old information and new information, pick out the correct information to be processed in Working
Memory and further reserved in long memory, eventually producing the best output.
Adopting a psychological approach to the investigation of L2 writing has potential for illuminating two areas of second language acquisition research.
First, it can advance our knowledge of the psycholinguistic processes of L2
21 written production and provide some evidence for the significance of noticing in SLA from the perspective of written output. Studies on L2 acquisition have gone from input (Krashen, 1985), to intake (Schmidt, 1990), and to output
(Swain, 1985; Swain and Lapkin, 1995). The role of noticing is to show the relationship between intake and output, by way of which to clarify the nature of language acquisition. As L2 acquisition in its broad sense includes both language learning and language use/production, research is also needed on the way noticing operates in L2 learning and performance. But most of the extent studies have dealt with the learning area with much fewer in the language performance aspect.
L2 teaching belongs to foreign language teaching. The study of noticing also gives an important enlightenment in L2 teaching and research. The teacher needs not only to view the common cognitive psychology of the learners but also to refer to the individual difference. And the English teaching based on noticing can integrate the above two points well.
Thus, the aim of the present study is to compare the different noticing aspects happening between L1 and L2 writing processes, based on a think-aloud writing experiment including fifty-eight Japanese and Chinese university students and examine how L2 writers who are at the same level of
L1 writing competence but at various levels of L2 proficiency manage their noticing aspects among Meaning, Discourse and Form, concretely speaking, among grammatical and lexical accuracy, the informational content and the contextual features of Discourse. It is hoped that the study will contribute to
22 expending or reassessing previous process-oriented writing studies．
The study is also of significance in pedagogy. English writing instruction under the EFL context will benefit from the present study in that the writer’s writing performance is richly informed about its underlying mechanism. For a long period of time, the inner mental process of writing activity has been lacked research, causing the writing practice merely to focus itself on “to practice writing as frequently as possible” while unable to instruct the student writer by intervening the writing process. A comprehensive investigation of the nature of writing process from a cognitive perspective may provide writing teachers with scientific instruction over how to help the student writers in their writing process, and consequently, influence their written product. In addition,
English teachers’ increasing awareness of students’ previous writing experience in L1 and L2 and the relationship between L1 and L2 writing processes might help the student writers improve their L2 academic writing ability in a more goal-oriented way．
1.4 Organization of the dissertation
This dissertation is composed of seven chapters. Chapter One introduces the dissertation, providing a holistic presentation of the study. The following two chapters, Chapter Two and Chapter Three pose the background and theory against which the present study is conducted. Chapter Two deals with the progress of study and various views on noticing in SLA, while Chapter Three reviews the major writing theories and empirical studies of L2 writing process.
23 Each chapter deals with the researcher’s critical comments, indicating the necessity and significance of the present study. Based on the theoretical and empirical research reviewed in the previous chapters, the researcher’s hypothetical model of writing is presented in Chapter Four. Chapter Four documents the methodology with concrete description of the procedures and makes data analysis of the study under two steps. One step is the analysis of original forty participants, another step is the analysis of added eighteen participants. Chapter Five reveals noticing happening in the writing process. It reports noticing from quantitative and qualitative analyses as to the allocation of noticing to the aspects of L1 and L2 writings and the degree of noticing in a comparison between L1 and L2 writing processes from Japanese and Chinese.
It also discusses the neural basis of noticing in the brain, tries to explore the syntactical processing mechanism, and introduces the unconscious noticing in the writing process. Chapter Six poses some enlightenment on the teaching methods through the theories and practice of teaching L2 writing, as well as the analysis in Chapter Four and Chapter Five. The last chapter—Chapter Seven is the conclusion of the whole study, in which theoretical and pedagogical implications are discussed and the limitations and suggestions for future research are also put forward.
24 Chapter 2 Study of Noticing
2.1 Noticing hypothesis
2.1.1 Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis
2.1.1.1 Origins of the noticing hypothesis
Noticing hypothesis was first put forward by Richard Schmidt in the
University of Hawaii. In the 1980s, the dominant theories of language and of
SLA overwhelmingly emphasized the unconscious nature of linguistic knowledge and unconscious processes of learning. Two cases studied that
Schmidt carried out in those years led him to question those assumptions. The first was a case study of an adult naturalistic (uninstructed) learner of English, an artist from Japan who immigrated to the U.S. at age 30 for a mix of personal and professional reasons, to whom Schmidt gave the pseudonym “Wes” and whose acquisition of English Schmidt documented over a period of several years (Schmidt, 1983, 1984). Wes was a remarkably good learner of English in many ways. His pronunciation was good from the beginning, and he developed quickly along the dimensions of fluency, lexical development, listening comprehension, conversational ability, pragmatic appropriateness, and especially strategic competence, the ability to get his message across in spite of the limitations of his interlanguage. If language is seen as a medium of communication, as a tool for initiating, maintaining and regulating relationships and carrying on the business of life, then Wes was (and had continued to be) a very successful language learner. Looking at Wes through a sociocognitive lens, seeing language as social practice to accomplish social
25 action and viewing SLA as alignment, fitting oneself to one’s environment, mediated and scaffolded by various actors and structures (Atkinson, 2010) also allowed the researchers to see Wes as a very good learner. His development in the area of grammar—morphology and syntax—was very limited, however,
Schmidt did not know and still do not know the reasons for this for sure, but one possible explanation Schmidt gave was that maybe he didn’t care much for the small grammatical details of language. Or perhaps he just didn’t notice them. For example, after several years of exposure he continued to say things like “Yesterday I’m go beach and Tomorrow I’m go beach” (with no articles, no prepositions, and no tense marking), even though he surely heard people say things like “I went to the beach yesterday”, but apparently without registering the forms. In other cases, it seemed that he probably did notice grammatical forms in input and tried to figure them out, but his guesses were often inaccurate. For example, after some time Schmidt became aware that he never produced any utterances with the English possessive pronoun “our”, and eventually realized that this was not because of ego-centrism or a fondness for the English word “my”, but simply because he did not know the form. Instead, he would say things like “We are come back here early, we are apartment apparently” meaning “We came back early to our apartment.” So Schmidt’s best guess was that this resulted from a mis-identification by Wes of their (as in their apartment) as “they are” and your (as in your apartment) as “you are”, and we were meaning “our”, an analysis supported by the fact that he also said things like “she’s name” (meaning “her name”) and “your friend is house”
26 (“your friend’s house”). More generally, looking nine English grammatical morphemes and taking 80% correct as a criterion for acquisition, Schmidt found that none moved from unacquired to acquired status in three years of observation. In trying to understand why Wes had such persistent problems with grammar (morphology, specifically), it seemed to Schmidt that effective factors such as motivation were probably not the answer. Indeed, his very good development in overall communicative competence seemed a reflection of his strong drive to communicate, coupled with a gregarious personality and willingness to take risks in speaking and learning. To explain why Wes did not develop much morphology, therefore, Schmidt considered two main possibilities: lack of aptitude and over-reliance on an implicit learning strategy, learning through interaction alone, with little attention to language form and little conscious reflection about language structure. So Schmidt concluded by proposing that, at least in the case of adult learning of grammar, wholly unconscious learning of a language was probably not possible. Because “adults do seem to have lost the still mysterious ability of children to acquire the grammatical forms of language while apparently not paying attention to them”
(Schmidt, 1983:172), some level of conscious attention to form was required.
The second case study concerned Schmidt’s own learning of Portuguese during a five month stay in Brazil (Schmidt and Frota, 1986). Schmidt took a class for five weeks, and the rest of his language learning was through interaction with native speakers. The results of this study indicated that classroom instruction was very useful, but presence and frequency in
27 communicative input were more important. In addition, based on comparisons among notes that he kept in a journal, records of what he was taught in class, and monthly tape-recordings of his developing L2 production and interaction abilities, Frota and Schmidt found that some forms that were frequent in input were still not acquired until they were consciously noticed in the input.
This was the origin of the Noticing hypothesis, the claim that learner must attend to and notice linguistic features of the input that they were exposed to if those forms were to become intake for learning. In addition, Schmidt found that although he was frequently corrected for his grammatical errors in conversation with native speakers, in many cases this had no effect because he was unaware that he was being corrected. This suggested a slightly different hypothesis that he called “noticing the gap”, the idea that in order to overcome errors, learners must make conscious comparisons between their own output and target language input.
Subsequently Schmidt attempted to flesh out these descriptions and informal proposals by matching them with the psychological literature on conscious vs. unconscious learning, which turned out to be a complicated matter, with several different but partly overlapping distinctions in the psychological literature. Reviewing the literature up to the end of the 1980s,
Schmidt framed the issues in terms of consciousness as intention, consciousness as attention, and consciousness as awareness (Schmidt, 1990), putting forth some claims about each.
Consciousness as intention was reflected in the distinction between
28 incidental learning, referring to the fact that people could learn things without having any particular intention to learn them, and intentional (goal-directed) learning. Incidental learning was certainly possible and often effective. The classic example was the fact that people learned most vocabulary through reading, although our goal in reading was usually understanding and enjoyment, not vocabulary acquisition. However, the facilitative effect of focused attention on stimulus detection was “all but undisputed” (Roehr, 2008: 83), and deliberately paying attention might be necessary in some cases, for example, when L2 learners failed to notice cues that were not salient or that needed to be processed differently from the way they were in the L1 (Ellis, 2006, 2008).
Consciousness as attention (whether intentional or not), then, seemed to be the heart of the matter, but liked many psychological constructs based initially on common experience, attention did not refer to a single mechanism but to a variety of mechanisms or subsystems, including alertness, orientation, detection within selective attention, facilitation, and inhibition (Schmidt, 2001;
Tomlin andVilla, 1994). What these had in common was the function of controlling information processing and behavior when existing skills and routines were inadequate. Learning—and—establishing new or modified knowledge, memory, skills, and routines was therefore largely, and perhaps exclusively, a side effect of attended processing. Still, the question of whether all learning required attention remained problematic, and conceptual and methodological issues had combined to make a definitive answer elusive, even after a century of psychological experimentation. Some psychologists had
29 expressed the opinion that this dispute would never be settled, because zero-point questions were not answerable (Baars, 1988). Baars argued that the important question was not whether there could be any learning without attention and conscious involvement (unanswerable) but rather whether more attention resulted in more learning. There did not appear to be any evidence at all against the weaker claimed that people learned about the things they attended to and learned much less about the things they did not attend to
(Logan, Taylor, and Etherton, 1996). Logan, Taylor and Etherton had also proposed a much more controversial hypothesis, that only those stimulus attributed that were attended in processing were encoded. This suggested that attention must be directed to whatever evidence was relevant for a particular learning domain, i.e. that attention must be specifically focused and not just global. In order to acquire phonology, one must attend to the sounds of target language input, especially those that were contrastive in the target language, and if one’s goal was to sound like a native speaker, one must attend to phonetic details as well. In order to acquire vocabulary one must attend to both word form (pronunciation, spelling) and to whatever cues were available in input that could lead to identification of meaning. In order to acquire pragmatics, one must attend to both the linguistic form of utterances and the relevant social and contextual features with which they were associated. In order to acquire morphology, one must attend to both the forms of morphemes and their meanings, and in order to acquire syntax one must attend to the order of words and the meanings they were associated with.
30 The role played by consciousness as awareness in SLA was most controversial. On the one hand, awareness and attention were closely linked—what we were aware of was what we attended to, and what we attended to determine what entered phenomenal consciousness (Baars,
1988)—so if attention was required for learning then perhaps awareness was as well. On the other hand, awareness of abstract rules of grammar could not be a prerequisite for learning, since native speakers had some intuitive understanding of subtle points of grammar that they could not verbalize, and some advanced naturalistic L2 learners also had intuitive knowledge that was closer to native speaker intuitions than to the simplified “rules” that were taught in language classes (Rothman, 2008). In psychology, the usual term for this was implicit knowledge, knowledge that was acquired without conscious effort to learn, without awareness that learning had occurred, and without the ability to describe the acquired information (Reber, 1993).
The solution Schmidt proposed (Schmidt, 1990, 2001) was to distinguish between “noticing” as a technical term limited to the conscious registration of attended specific instances of language, and “understanding,” a higher level of awareness that included generalizations across instances. Knowledge of rules and meta-linguistic awareness of all kinds belonged to this higher level of awareness. Schmidt’s proposal was that noticing was necessary for SLA, and that understanding was facilitative but not required. These notions were in wide circulation, did not belong to a person, and surface (not always with the same definitions) in numerous accounts of SLA in the past few decades, including
31 but not limited to the exploration of basic issues of implicit and explicit learning in SLA (Hulstijn, 2003, 2005; N. Ellis, 1994, 2005, 2006, 2008;
Robinson, 1995a, 1995b, 1996, 2002); relationships between explicit/implicit learning and explicit/implicit teaching (R. Ellis, 2001, 2005; Ellis, Basturkmen and Loewen, 2001; Thornbury, 1997); Swain’s (1995) incorporation of the concepts of noticing and noticing the gap into a sociocultural model of learning;
Van Patten’s (1996, 2004) proposals for input processing instruction; Long’s
(1996) revised interaction hypothesis and the focus on form literature (Doughty,
2001; Doughty and Williams, 1998; Long and Robinson, 1998); and Gass and
Mackey’s (2006) model of input, interaction and learning. Most empirical studies had been supportive of the noticing hypothesis. For example, using a clever crossword puzzle task to manipulate the focus of learners’ attention when exposed to instances of Spanish stem-changing verbs, Leow (1997, 2000) found that those who exhibited a higher level of awareness (“understanding”) learned the most; those who noticed instances but attempted no generalization learned next most; and there was no learning in the absence of noticing instances. Mackey (2006) used multiple measures of noticing and development to investigate whether feedback promoted noticing of L2 forms in a classroom context and whether there was a relationship between learners’ reports of noticing and learning outcomes. The findings of this study were that learners reported more noticing when feedback was provided, and learners who exhibited more noticing developed more than those who exhibited less noticing.
Izumi (2002) conducted an experimental study to compare the effects of output
32 and enhanced input on noticing and development. Izumi found that subjects demonstrated more noticing and more learning than did controls, and that enhanced input subjects exhibited more noticing but not more learning.
The claim that “noticing” but not “understanding” was required for learning implied that both explicit and implicit learning of generalizations were possible. In the case of explicit learning, attended and noticed instances became the basis for explicit hypothesis formation and testing. Implicit learning was also hypothesized to depend on attended instances in the input, but generalization beyond the instance was held to depend on a basic human learning mechanism that automatically detected regularities across instances, resulting in an intuitive form of knowledge that went beyond what could be verbalized. Experimental evidence for implicit second language learning, in this sense of learning generalizations without awareness and without the ability to express them, was actually quite limited. Ellis (1993) failed to find implicit learning effects in a task designed to promote the learning of a Welsh soft-mutation rule, and DeKeyser (1995) found no implicit learning in an experiment involving a miniature artificial language with rich inflectional morphology. In the classic miniature artificial grammar learning experiments in psychology (“sentences” in these experiments consisting of meaningless strings of letters), participants learned implicitly in the sense of being able to judge the acceptability of untrained items without being able to verbalize the rules the researcher used to generate the sentences, but the current consensus was not that subjects internalized the rules and abstract structure of the grammar, as
33 originally believed; rather, people picked up lower-level knowledge about permissible chunks, repetitions, alternations, and so on that allowed above chance performance (Schmidt, 1995; Williams, 2009). As Williams (2009) pointed out, to date very few language studies had even attempted to establish that implicit knowledge was acquired in the absence of awareness, so it was somewhat surprising that many SLA scholars asserted that implicit learning was the default mechanism in adult SLA (Long, 2010; Ortega, 2009). However,
Williams pointed out that “the term implicit learning is often simply used to refer to a mode of learning that is incidental and inductive...even if the implicitness of the resulting knowledge was not actually established” (Williams,
2009, p. 327). If the question was just whether incidental inductive learning was possible, it was, although some learners do better at this than others.
Implicit learning was also sometimes defined simply as uninstructed learning,
“learning without the benefit of rule explanation” (Ortega, 2009, p.157). Of course, it was also possible to learn without instruction, but that did not mean that the learning took place without awareness (self-instruction) at the point of learning. However, more recently, evidence of implicit learning in the sense of learning without awareness had come from experiments in statistical learning, an approach that saw acquisition as the unselective and passive absorption of statistical regularities in the environment, for example, the transitional probabilities between phonetic units or syllables in speech, which led to the discovery of phonemes and words (Kuhl, 2004). The dominant interpretation of these studies was that people unconsciously showed these probabilities (Ellis,
34 2006), and since subjects had no sense of doing so, the learning was unconscious in that sense.
2.1.1.2 Individual difference between noticing and awareness
Did some second language learners notice more than others? If so, did individual difference in noticing ability correlate with rate of learning and/or ultimate attainment? The evidence from case studies suggested that the answer was yes to both questions. A comparison of Wes with another well-known language learner, “Julie”, a native speaker of English who emigrated to Cairo at the age of 21 when she married an Egyptian, was instructive. As reported by
Ioup, Boustagui, El-Tigi, and Moselle (1994), who studied Julie’s acquisition of Arabic after 26 years of exposure,
“Julie was a purely naturalistic learner who had no formal instruction in
Arabic. Like Wes, she obtained abundant comprehensible input and was socially outgoing. Like him, she also had good pronunciation and excellent communicative skills. Unlike Wes, however, she displayed native-like grammatical competence in her second language, not only passing as a native speaker in everyday life but performing at native-like or near native-like levels on grammaticality judgment tests that tapped intuitions on some of the most remote properties of the language. Why had Wes acquired English grammar so slowly, while Julie acquired Arabic grammar rapidly and essentially perfectly?
Many students, after reading my detailed report of Wes’ personality, motivation, daily life and accomplishments in language learning, commented that he probably did not acquire a lot of grammar because he didn’t need to, the
35 grammatical trimmings being mostly unnecessary for communicative interaction. However, the idea that people learned just what they needed to learn didn’t hold up well to the evidence. Wes’ grammatical competence in
English was not really adequate for all his needs, a fact he was well aware of, and Julie’s accomplishments went well beyond any argument from need.”
In Schmidt’s description of Wes’ learning and Ioup et al.’s discussion of
Julie’s learning we found a number of candidates for differences that might have made the difference. From the beginning, Julie kept a copybook that she filled with notes, lists of verbs, nouns and adjectives, and observations about gender, number and person. “I never observed Wes doing anything similar and although he owned an English-Japanese dictionary he told me that he seldom if ever consulted it. Julie reported that she consciously manipulated the grammatical structure of the language, paid attention to morphological variation, kept careful track of corrections, expanded repetitions from native speakers, and greatly appreciated the feedback. Wes, in contrast, has never appreciated being corrected. One of the things I had admired about him was his attitude that if native speakers didn’t understand him, it was as much their fault as his and they needed to try harder, but this attitude might not be ideal for language learning.”
In their analysis of the reasons for Julie’s success, Ioup et al. identified two factors that they believed were decisive: attention to form, and innate talent.
They concluded, as Schmidt did when analyzing Wes’ linguistic development, that “adults, unlike children, appear to require conscious attention to
36 grammatical form” (p.93). But even with attention to form, most L2 learners did not achieve native-like proficiency, and Ioup et al. noted that Julie reported having all the traits associated with the “Geschwind cluster”, identified in a study of another exceptionally talented language learner, who was studied by
Novoa, Fein, and Obler (1988), including left-handedness, allergies and a family history of twinning. For the rest of us—for whom twins, allergies, left-handedness, and exceptional talent for languages might not run in our families—there were still likely to be differences in both inclination and abilities that affected what we noticed (Godfroid, 2010) and what we learned.
Consider motivation. Virtually everyone would agree that motivated learners learned more (all else being equal) than unmotivated learners. But why? How did motivation work? What was the mechanism? It seemed that there were two somewhat competing accounts. Motivation might act as part of an effective filter that prevented input from reaching that part of the brain where the language acquisition device (by some accounts, more-or-less equivalent to the human capacity for implicit learning) was located, as Krashen (1985) proposed.
Or, motivation might be viewed as something much less passive, as Gardner
(1988) would have it: motivated learners were successful because they were active learners. Gardner proposed that motivated learners learned better than unmotivated ones because they paid attention more and selectively attended to morphosyntactic information, not only content information. Paying attention resulted in more noticing, and motivated learners might also try harder and more persistently to understand the significance of noticed language, achieving
37 higher levels of awareness and enhanced learning as a result. Tremblay and
Gardner (1995), arguing that models of motivation could be improved by the identification of mediators that explained why one variable effected another, proposed that three motivational behaviors mediated between distant factors such as language attitudes, motivation and achievement: effort, persistence, and attention. Other studies (MacIntyre and Noels, 1996; Schmidt, Boraie and
Kassabgy, 1996) had found links between motivation and learning strategies, particularly cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies, which were either strategies for focusing attention on some aspects of the target language or for sustaining attention while doing something else in addition: inferencing, looking for patterns, or monitoring—paying attention to output, as well as one’s progress in learning.
As for aptitude, various theories had proposed different relationships among aptitude, noticing and SLA. According to one account, the fundamental difference between first language acquisition and adult language learning, was that child first language acquisition depended on implicit learning, which was unaffected by differences in aptitude, while adult language learning depended more on explicit learning, which was affected by aptitude (Bley-Vroman, 1989;
Krashen, 1981; Reber, 1993). A different account had been proposed by
Robinson (1995b, 2002), who argued that for adults aptitude would matter across all conditions of learning (implicit, explicit, incidental) because the same basic cognitive abilities (including noticing and rehearsal) were involved in all learning.
38 Recent studies had produced significant evidence that aptitude, noticing and learning were indeed linked, even if the patterns among components of aptitude and learning outcomes in different studies had been quite variable
(Ortega, 2009; Skehan, 1998). Mackey, Philp, Tatsumi (2002) reported relationships between individual difference in working memory, hypothesized to be a component of language aptitude and the noticing of interactional feedback (recasts). It had been suggested, in fact, that the name “working memory” might be a misnomer, and that a more appropriate label might be
“working attention” (Baddeley, 1993). In a larger scale study of L1 Spanish learners of Swedish, Abrahamson and Hyltenstam (2008) reported small yet significant aptitude effects in child SLA, and very large effects for adult SLA, confirming the hypothesis proposed by DeKeyser (2000) that a high degree of language aptitude was required if adults were to reach near-native proficiency.
In this study, language aptitude was measured by a battery of tests assessing phonetic memory, lexical-morphological analytic skills, aural memory, and the ability to form sound-symbol associations. Abrahamsson and
Hyltenstam also commented that an outstanding characteristic of their two highest proficiency participants was an unusual interest and devotion to language structure and language learning: “Their professional lives have provided them with extraordinary opportunities to reflect consciously and explicitly on the linguistic structure of Swedish, which has made it possible for them...to beat the predictions of the critical period hypothesis” (p.502). For example, their participant with the highest score on their proficiency measures
39 had lived in Spain, France, Ireland, and Sweden; studied German, English,
Latin, and Italian as foreign languages; worked professionally for 10 years as an interpreter; and described herself as very communicative, linguistically observant, sometimes preferring to listen to the linguistic structure rather than the content when someone spoke beautifully. It would seem that most of these cases of very successful learners illustrated the use of explicit modes of learning to compensate for age-related declines in implicit learning abilities.
However, to the degree that noticing was hypothesized to be also involved in at least some kinds of implicit learning (Perruchet and Pacton, 2006), it was possible that individual differences in implicit learning abilities might exist and that these were also related to noticing.
Research on individual difference in implicit and statistical learning was in its infancy but appeared promising. Although it was generally thought that individual differences in implicit learning were minor compared to differences in explicit learning ability (Reber, 1993; Stanovich, 2009), Hoyer and Lincourt
(1998) have reported age-related declines in the efficiency of instance learning;
Feeney and Howard (2002) have demonstrated age-related deficits in implicit learning of higher order sequences. These studies concerned difference between middle aged and elderly people compared with college students, but among younger populations as well, some recent research had shown that implicit learning was an ability with meaningful individual differences that might be linked to language processing and language learning. In a study of English 16- to 17- year old teenagers, Kaufman, DeYoung, Gray, Jiménez, Brown and
40 Mackintosh (2010) investigated associations between individual differences in implicit learning (measured by a probabilistic sequence learning task) with a variety of cognitive and personality variables. In this study, implicit learning was found to be related to two components of psychometric intelligence (verbal analogical reasoning and processing speed) as well as performance on French and German foreign language exams. In another recent study, Misyak and
Christiansen (in press) investigated the relationship between individual difference in statistical learning and language comprehension. Participants were administered statistical learning tasks involving adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies, along with a language comprehension task and a battery of other measures assessing verbal working memory, short-term memory, vocabulary, reading experience, cognitive motivation, and fluid intelligence. Strong relationships were found among statistical learning, verbal working memory, and language comprehension, establishing an empirical link between individual difference in statistical learning and L1 language processing.
2.1.1.3 Noticing and attention
Attention and noticing (the subjective correlate of attention) are crucial concepts for understanding second and foreign language learning. As Baars
(1997) put it, “Paying attention—becoming conscious of some material—seems to be the sovereign remedy for learning anything ... It is the universal solvent of the mind” (Baars 1997, p. 304). For SLA, the allocation of attention was the pivotal point at which learner external factors (including the complexity and distributional characteristics of input, the discoursal and
41 interactional context, instructional treatment, and task characteristics) and learner internal factors (including motivation, aptitude, learning styles and strategies, current L2 knowledge and processing ability) came together. What happened then within attentional space largely determined the course of language development, including the growth of knowledge (establishment of new representations) and the development of fluency (access to those representations). Evidence continued to accumulate that noticing had a strong impact on second and foreign language learning. Individual differences were an important part of the story, and both inclinations and abilities affected who noticed what. Aptitude for explicit learning played a role in overcoming age-related weaknesses in implicit learning. Much remained to be done to relate “noticing” to related constructs such as cognitive style, depth of processing, self-regulation, and executive attention. Individual differences in implicit learning ability also seemed to exist. These had hardly begun to be explored, but this was a promising area for future research, which could also profitably include a research plan to identify the ways that both explicit and implicit learning ability were affected by life histories, literacy (Bigelow,
Delmas, Hansen and Tarone, 2006), and multilingualism.
During the three functional subsystems of attention (alertness, orientation, detection), detection was crucial, but detection did not require awareness
(Tomlin and Villa, 1994).1 Although it was true that detection (registration of a stimulus) could occur below the level of subjective awareness, this was
1 Schmidt, R. Attention, awareness, and individual differences in language learning. Proceedings of CLASIC 2010, pp.721-737
42 generally the case only for already established representations, that was, while there was subliminal perception, there was no subliminal learning (Schmidt,
1995, 2001). However, Williams (2005) reported a very interesting experiment examining the learning of form-meaning connections under conditions where the relevant forms (determiners) were attended and noticed but the contingencies (whether the head noun was animate or inanimate) was not.
During the training, some participants became aware of this contingency, and performed nearly perfectly on a post-test with new items. Other subjects seemed to remain completely unaware of the conditioning factor but still exhibited a small but statistically significant animacy bias in their responses.
Even though it could not be conclusively claimed that these subjects had no awareness whatsoever at the point of learning, and although both an earlier experiment by Williams (2004) and a recent replication study by Hama and
Leow (2010) failed to find evidence of learning without awareness, Williams’ findings were interesting and intriguing, suggesting that “implicit learning of form meaning connections is possible, at least in principle” (p. 298). Williams’ finding that implicit learning in these experiments was correlated with participants’ prior knowledge of languages with grammatical gender was equally intriguing, suggesting that prior experience in language learning might play a role in implicit learning.
2.1.1.4 Conclusion
Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis (1995, 2001) was the first psychologically orientated theory that succeeded in achieving mainstream status in SLA
43 research. The heart of the noticing hypothesis was the claim that only those parts of the input that the learner noticed actually became available for intake and effective processing. The great popularity of the noticing idea was due to the fact that it addressed two fundamental issues on the SLA process. Firstly, explicit and conscious learning played an important role in the SLA process, which totally rejected Krashen’s implicit-only view. The noticing hypothesis stated that effective implicit learning could not occur without explicitly creating the initial mental representation of a new stimulus. Skehan said,
“Schmidt is claiming, in contrast to Krashen (1985) that a degree of awareness is important before material can be incorporated into a developing interlanguage system” (Skehan, 1998, p.48). Thus, the noticing theory was in complete accordance with the “explicit/declarative first, implicit/procedural second” assumption which seemed to have emerged in a number of diverse areas. Secondly, why did only a selected portion of input become intake during the learning process? The strong version of the noticing hypothesis claimed that only those noticed features of a target structure would be learnt. Schmidt stated,
“Attention must be directed to whatever evidence is relevant for a particular learning domain, i.e. that attention must be specifically focused and not just global” (Schmidt, 2001, p.30). This was the very positive taken by several cognitive psychologists when discussing the question of initial noticing in psychological theories.
2.1.2 Robinson’s study
Schmidt’s claim was supported by Robinson (2003) in a detailed analysis
44 of the role of attention in SLA. He argued that the strong form of the noticing hypothesis could only explain the case frequently observed. Even abundant exposure accompanied by focus on meaning such as in immersion classrooms resulted in an imbalance between the high fluency of the learner’s communicative skills and the significantly lower level of accuracy of their speech. As he summarized, such learners failed to notice the communicatively redundant, perceptually non-salient, or infrequent forms in the input.
Robinson’s (2003: 641) characterization explained the ambiguous nature of incidental learning—the implicit-like features of an explicit process,
“Undoubtedly, while processing oral L2 input for meaning, as in naturalistic or immersion environments and during L2 reading, learners do unintentionally attend to, notice, and learn many vocabulary or grammatical and pragmatic features of the L2 (incidental learning).” It was admittedly easy to get confused here (e.g. What are we to make of “unintentional noticing”?), and therefore we should not be surprised that we found a mixture of somewhat different meanings of the term in the literature.
Robinson (2003:641) put forward the view of interface between explicit and implicit L2 knowledge, “Is it more effective to proactively instruct learners in targeted features prior to communicative activities, via a brief rule explanation or meta-linguistic summary (instructed learning)? Or is it better to adopt less communicatively instrusive techniques for focusing attention on form, by giving learners instructions to process for meaning (e.g. to read a news article in preparation for a debate) while drawing their attention, through
45 underlining or highlighting, to targeted forms in the text (enhanced learning)?”
2.1.3 Dörnyei’s study
Dörnyei (2008) divided the three psychological processes attention, consciousness and noticing. While describing these processes, he employed a lot of energy into the discussion of attention. Regarding noticing, he not only introduced Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis but also introduced some other researchers’ views to add to the content of noticing hypothesis. He refered to N.
Ellis (2002b) who described experiments on artificial grammar learning that had shown that when two structures that had been noticed individually before occurring regularly together in the same sequence, this co-occurrence could lead to implicit chunking, which was the central mechanism of the exemplar-based (or usage-based) theories of language acquisition. Paradis
(2004) also acknowledged the possibility of unconscious learning in cases where we focused on one aspect of speech sequences while picking up something other than what was noticed, namely the covert implicit underlying structure. It was likely, however, that associations that were more complex than adjacency or first-order dependency would require conscious attention, but at the moment we did not know how various aspects of language differed in their attentional requirements (N. Ellis 2002b).
According to Dörnyei (2008:166), “Schmidt (2001:27) accepts that the strong form of the noticing hypothesis does not hold in some situations and that
‘there can be representation and storage in memory of unattended novel stimuli, something frequently claimed but not convincingly demonstrated in the past’.
46 Schmidt also mentioned the possibility because many features of language were too subtle and abstract to notice, global rather than specific attention to L2 input might be sufficient in their case. But similar to N. Ellis (2002a, b, 2005), he argued that in certain cases there were no exceptions to the requirement of attentional focus. Typical examples include cases when, due to existing L1-L2 differences, it was necessary to attend to new kinds of information or to suppress the automatic processing of other information. Schmidt concluded this discussion thus:
The question of whether all learning from input requires attention to that input remains problematic, and conceptual issues and methodological problems have combined to make a definitive answer illusive, even after a century of psychological experimentation. If the issue is seen as one of intention or the voluntary orientation of attention onto stimuli, the answer seems to be that intention is not a general requirement. However, because goals and motivation are such important determinants of the focus on attention, paying deliberate attention to less salient or redundant aspects of L2 input may be a practical necessity (p.29)”.
Dörnyei (2008: 166) made a conclusion, “While we cannot exclude cases where we learn language aspects that are not specifically attended to, it is universally accepted that specifically attending to aspects of the language input enhances the effectiveness of learning. Thus, as argued earlier, there is an undeniable positive correlation between consciousness and learning. In
Schmidt’s (2001: 3) words, ‘There is no doubt that attended learning is far
47 superior, and for all practical purposes, attention is necessary for all aspects of
L2 learning.’ This recognition has led over the past fifteen years to the development of a number of different language teaching approaches that include an explicit component such as consciousness raising, input enhancement, processing instruction, focus on form, and the principled communicative approach.”
2.2 Different views on noticing
As the deeper study of cognitive psychology, some scholars put forward different views on noticing. They believed that noticing was not equal to attention nor did it belong to a part of attention. Attention was a preparatory stage of consciousness, in which the competitive input was selected and paid attention to and then waits to be processed in consciousness. On the other hand, noticing was not a simple process of paying attention to the input, but a much more complicated cognitive process. It was to achieve a final adjustment of language. This adjustment led to reduce the interference of L1 on L2 and produce L2 output as accurately and naturally as possible. It usually involved improving pronunciation and intonation, modifying spellings and grammatical mistakes, adjusting and integrating sentence structures and meanings, reorganizing paragraphs and even the whole content.
2.2.1 Shirahata’s study
Shirahata et al. (1999) considered noticing as a separate psychological process different from attention. He stated that as for the SLA process, the first
48 step was to pay attention to selective input and aroused consciousness. Then, the central executive in the brain began to work and processes all the input information through the sequential steps of memory function. The important step lay in the next stage. Following the information processing in memory, the learner had acquired some new information to prepare for output. In order to output the accessible information, there should be a process for adjustment in the brain for the learner to select or generate the correct information through comparison between the new information acquired and the old information stored in the brain. This adjustment process should be considered as noticing.
2.2.2 Ikari’s study
Ikari (2009) studied different processes of language acquisition and found in the first language (L1) acquisition, after the information processing in attention and consciousness was applied, the new information could be output automatically by the language processing function of the brain with the fairly limited use of noticing. On the contrary, in L2 acquisition, noticing was an indispensable process in company with conscious processing. With the help of the function of noticing in the brain, the learner could manage to consciously produce the output accurately. In other words, noticing was a special and indispensable psychological process in L2 acquisition.
Besides, Ikari (2015) also modified the psychological mechanism of L2 acquisition from “Attention ￫ Consciousness ￫ Noticing” to “Prediction ￫
Attention￫Consciousness￫Noticing”. He believed that before one paid attention to something, his/her brain got ready for all the information involved. That is to
49 say, the learner was always unconsciously activating possible information to be processed in the brain before paying attention to it.
In addition to the above consideration, Ikari (2015) suggested another possible aspect of noticing. He believed it could occur in the unconscious processing as well as the conscious one based on the information transition from cerebrum to cerebellum with unconscious processing. See the figure 1.
new learning skillful learning Figure1 Noticing processing: the function of cerebrum and cerebellum （Pinel, 2014）
In this figure we can see that when one tries to learn a new skill, cerebrum is very much activated while when he/she is getting used to a particular skill, cerebellum is taking its place instead. It follows from this that people are doing conscious processing in the cerebrum while unconscious processing in the cerebellum. Noticing seems to occur somewhere between cerebrum and cerebellum.
2.2.3 Yamadori’s study
Noticing usually occurs in the conscious processing, shifting from
50 attention to logical way of thinking. Yamadori (2002) classified noticing into several types: intuition, arranging the information, finding the rules and correcting the errors
Noticing usually emerged when the brain worked under the following several situations: First, the whole image was absorbed in the brain. Second, the brain divided the whole image into several parts and then arranged the sequences. During the above working processes in the brain, noticing occured in the way of intuition, arranging the information, finding the rules and correcting the errors. (Yamadori, 2002, p.181)
2.2.4 Types of noticing
Concerning the above views on noticing, some examples are demonstrated below.
2.2.4.1 Noticing in written English
Mukai (2010) carried out an experiment to examine whether noticing in silent reading happened more frequently than in reading aloud in consideration of Working Memory. The result was different from our expectation. Noticing in reading aloud happened more often than in silent reading.
It follows from her reading experiment that people notice mistakes more easily in the active participation such as reading aloud than passive involvement such as silent reading. It is probably because people could pay more attention in productive activities than comprehensive ones. This is based on the idea that conscious noticing follows careful attention.
51 2.2.4.2 Keller’s noticing
There was a very familiar noticing occurring in the interaction between
Helen and her teacher Ms. Sullivan. The description below was derived from her autobiography.
We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honey suckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other hand the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers.
Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten - a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!（Keller, 1972, p.34）
In her autobiography she expressed her ‘noticing’ as something of a conscious process. However, there seemed to be no proof that her finding was based on conscious processing. Instead it was possible that the process of noticing could take place in the unconscious establishment of her linguistic system through the integration of meaning, i.e. water itself and form, finger print of water.
2.2.4.3 Noticing observed in overregularization
This was a very interesting phenomenon observed in the process of language development. In the conversation involving overregularization people could see some different aspects of noticing. The dialogue below was a typical example of overregularization.
52 Adult: Where's Mommy?
Child: Mommy goed to the store.
Adult: Mommy goed to the store?
Child: NO! (annoyed) Daddy, I say it that way, not you.
Adult: Mommy wented to the store?
Child: NO!
Adult: Mommy went to the store.
Child: That's right. Mommy wennn ... Mommy goed to the store. (O' Grady, 2005, p.23)
The child knew adults’ right form of an irregular verb, went. So she noticed the two wrong forms, goed and wented uttered by an adult.
Simultaneously she didn’t notice that she was using a wrong form of the verb, went. What she actually did at this moment had something to do with a different kind of noticing. That was, noticing of the regularity of word ending of past-tense English verbs. This kind of noticing was done unconsciously.
From the examination of the above examples the nature of noticing can be described as follows:
(1) Noticing is an indispensable process in L2 acquisition.
(2) Noticing includes two types: conscious and unconscious
(3) Noticing might be closely related to the processing between cerebellum and cerebrum.
(4) Noticing occurs in the following processes:
prediction ￫ attention ￫ conscious/unconscious processing ￫ noticing
53 2.2.5 Stages of noticing
As mentioned above, noticing is a more complex cognitive process in comparison with attention and includes conscious noticing and unconscious noticing. In this part, we will discuss the different stages of conscious noticing based on general cognitive regulation in the brain.
2.2.5.1 First stage of noticing
While the central executive of working memory functions, relevant given information is activated. Immediately after this, the learner is to process new information in the brain. So, at the first stage of noticing, the learner initially pays attention to all the information he/she has captured in the current processing of working memory, and noticing might occur in a very conscious way through the comparison of given and new information.
2.2.5.2 Second stage of noticing
In the second stage noticing works in a different way. Like the first stage it occurs following highly cognitive functions such as attention, consciousness, comparison and analysis. The difference is whether it has time for reorganization of the processed information. The learner separates the integral information into several parts to check if unconformity or mistakes might exist in both language forms and meanings and arrange them appropriately. This process is initiated through two different triggers: self-initiated trigger and other-initiated trigger. The self-initiated trigger was activated when the speaker’s utterance was not correct in a certain way while the other-initiated trigger was activated by the interlocutor’s explicit statement (Shehadeh, 2001).
54 The result shows that the source of initiation (self /other) has a significant effect on the correct output. Shehadeh’s study explains the nature of two triggers’ possibility of playing a significant part in noticing. To speak more concretely, other-initiation is even more important than self-initiation at the beginning of L2 learning. With the improvement of L2 proficiency, the role of self-initiation gradually catches up with other-initiation. This self-initiation is most significant in the noticing process. The process of improving L2 level from beginner to advanced is a process of promoting shift ability from other-initiation to self-initiation in the noticing process.
2.2.5.3 Third stage of noticing
After the second stage, the learner may receive all kinds of information with respect to integration. The next task is to adjust all the information, integrate and especially internalize the other-initiated information in order to cause another sophisticated self-initiation. This is a process of integrative noticing, which is a very significant process involved in the establishment of a system. Through this final stage output is finally settled with all the accurate information for the moment.
In consideration of noticing, we also need to deal with the relationship between noticing and output. According to Swain’s output hypothesis, output forces the brain to pay attention to the target information more strongly, leading to the adjustment of the language. As we observed self-initiated and other-initiated triggers in the second stage of noticing, it was clear that output has actually played a very important role in promoting noticing.
55 2.2.6 Mechanism of the psychological process of L2 acquisition
After illustrating the three stages of noticing, we have finished exploring noticing systematically. Now, not only can we understand the mechanism of noticing clearly but also grasp the whole psychological process of L2 acquisition completely. We can draw a diagram to reveal these processes concretely. The diagram is as follows：
input Working Memory
attention new consciousness information
self-initiated trigger noticing output t other-initiated old trigger information
Figure2 Psychological Processes of Attention, Consciousness and Noticing (Geng, B. and Ikari, Y., 2014)
2.3 Chapter summary
In this chapter, noticing is detailedly discussed from the following aspects:
Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis, different views on noticing, nature of noticing, steps of noticing and mechanism of noticing. The view of noticing has been changed with the development of cognitive psychology and neurolinguistics.
Schmidt believes that noticing is equal to attention or belongs to the final complex psychological part of attention. However, some Japanese researchers
56 developed his view. They define attention and noticing as two different language processes and believe noticing happens after consciousness during
Working Memory. The latter view of noticing is adopted to be the theoretical basis in this research. Since this research is concerned with L2 writing, the next question for us to illustrate is the study of L2 writing and noticing in L2 writing.
57 Chapter 3 Study of L2 Writing and Noticing in L2 Writing
3.1 Study of L2 writing
L2 writing research has been mainly conducted from two perspectives: product-oriented studies and process-oriented studies. The former is often referred to as CR (Contrastive Rhetoric), which stresses the negative influence of the writer’s L1 on an L2 because of the different cultural backgrounds and thinking patterns between the two languages. As Grabe and Kaplan (1996) admit, one problem with CR is that it focuses on the product without giving adequate attention to the ways in which text is produced. In view of this situation, the interest of present studies rests on the internal mechanism of psychological functioning in the writing process. However, since there have not been enough process-oriented studies of L2 writing, we can only obtain related studies from L1 writing. Most L1 writing process models have provided L2 writing research with a systematically theoretical and experimental basis for an investigation into the L2 process. But as Kroll (2003) claimed, “It is a uniquely characterized specialty area that does not completely overlap but has ties to the fields of L1 writing instruction, L2 acquisition, or L2 pedagogy.”
According to the former research, the influential factors of L2 writing ability should be L1 expertise and L2 proficiency. On the one hand L2 writing seems to be related to L1 writing expertise, which is generally reflected in the strategies used in the writing process or in the quality of L1 writing. On the other hand L2 writing seems to be constrained by the writer’s L2 proficiency.
Besides, other factors also influence L2 writing. For instance, personality,
58 educational context, cultural background, the purpose of writing, audience, and the nature of the topic are additionally thought to have a great effect on the act of writing.
The study of L2 writing begins with a discussion of the three classical models of writing which have proved dominant in both L1 and L2 writing studies. Then it presents an investigation of the empirical studies in L2 writing related to influencing factors, such as L1 writing, L2 proficiency and in different contexts, specifically speaking ESL and EFL contexts. Additionally, all examination of the studies of the role of attention/noticing in L2 writing is presented. The last section offers a critical evaluation of each of the three sections.
3.1.1 L2 writing research
L2 writing research has been mainly conducted from two perspectives: product-oriented studies and process-oriented studies. The former was often referred to as CR (Contrastive Rhetoric) ， which stresses on the negative influence of the writer’s L1 on an L2 because of the different cultural background and thinking patterns between the two languages. Since the publication of its first article by Kaplan (1966), contradictory findings (Kaplan,
1966, 1972 VS Mohan and Lo, 1985) have been yielded for the past four-decades. This static investigation of the writer’s final product could only explain what the writer wrote but left how the writer wrote unexamined. As
Grabe and Kaplan (1996) admitted, one problem with CR was that it focused on the product without giving adequate attention to the ways in which text was
59 produced. In view of this opinion, the interest of the present study rested on the internal mechanism of noticing functioning in the writing process. Therefore, this chapter confines itself mainly to the examination of writing process research except when the findings from some process studies are compared with the findings of written product studies．
3.1.2 Major models of writing
Studies in L2 writing have systematically adopted theoretical and experimental models developed to describe composing in the writer’s first language, which in turn have been developed on the basis of the theories in cognition, psychology, or social linguistics. Grabe (2001) pointed out that until now there were non-specific L2 theories of writing. However, the available theories posit a very similar set of processes, and there is general acceptance that they are broadly similar in both L1 and L2 writing. The most influential models of the writing process that stress particularly on cognitive processing are those proposed by Flower and Hayes (1981), Bereiter and Scardamalia
(1987)，and Kellogg (1996)．
3.1.2.1 Flower and Hayes’s model
Since 1979 when Flower and Hayes proposed their first model of writing, the original model had been modified many times (Hayes and Flower, 1980,
1983; Hayes, 1996, 2000; Chenoweth and Hayes, 2001), but the basic components unchanged. These series of studies all involved three elements that interacted among each other. The task environment included the factors influencing the writing task outside the writer, such as the assignment, the
60 audience and the text. The writer’s long-term memory included knowledge that the writer could retrieve during the act of writing, such as that of the topic, writing plans, genre, rhetorical problems. The component, the composing processor, included the thinking process employed by the writer, such as planning, translating and reviewing.
These three processes are under the monitoring of an executive control.
Later modifications of the original model tend to include more elements, such as the affective and social factors in Hayes’s (1996) model and to underscore the functioning of working memory (Hayes, 2000) in the writing process.
Hayes’s (2000) model added the individual component, which included motivation and affect, cognitive processes, working memory and long-term memory, each process interacting with the others. This model stressed more on the cognitive nature of writing process by applying the central role of working memory in writing and claiming the role of motivation and affects. Further modification was made in the Chenoweth and Hayes’ (2001) model of written language production. It had three levels (a source level, a process level, and a control level) and four internal processing components (the proposer, the translator, the transcriber, and the reviser). The source level included linguistic knowledge and general knowledge in the two memories and was called on by the other two levels. The process level had two componential processes. One was the internal process and the other was the external environment. The internal process consisted of a proposer, a translator, a reviser, and a transcriber.
These four processes worked in a chain of sentence production starting from
61 ideas to be expressed in the proposer to the converting of these prelinguistic ideas into strings of language in the translator, and then the reviser evaluated both the proposed and written language. If it was judged acceptable, the process was followed by the turning of the content into written form in the transcribing. But if it was not acceptable, the proposer or the translator processes again. At the control level, other kinds of knowledge were called upon, including the task schema such as writing strategies. At this level, writers of different writing strategies might not exert the same control over the writing task．
TASK ENVIRONMENT
THE RHETORICAL TEXT PROBLEM PRODUCED Topic Audience SO FAR Exigency G N I T A R E N
THEWRITER’S E PLANNING TRANSLA REVIEWING G TING LONG-TERM ORGANIZ EVALUATING MEMORY ING Knowledge of Topic Audience GOAL EDITING And Writing SETTING Plans
MONITOR
Figure 3 Flower-Hayes model (From Hayes and Flower, 1983, p.208)
62 3.1.2.2 Bereiter and Scardamalia’s dual system
Researchers such as Flower and Hayes analyzed the writing process in terms of recursive and interactive stages as the common features of all writers.
However, Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) posed two different processing models depicting how novice and mature writers wrote in terms of cognitive complexity, the knowledge-telling and the knowledge-transforming models.
They argued that people with different writing skills did not compose the same way. The knowledge-telling model involved a low level of complexity. The writing process of knowledge-telling was a streamlined set of procedures that novice and unskilled writers undertook to make the complex problem-solving activities alleviated. The writing process mainly involved converting oral language experiences into written forms. The primary goal of writing was to tell what one knew about a given topic. In contrast, in the knowledge-transforming model, mature and skilled writers exerted a more sophisticated interplay of problem recognition and solution. In this process, writers thought of information ordering, relative salience of information, audience expectation and logical patterns of argument organization. This model encompassed the knowledge-telling process, whereas, it was more complicated in that it also included problem-analysis and goal-setting, content problem space and rhetorical problem space. These components were interactive, with the output of one component being the input for another.
63 MENTAL REPRESENTATION OF ASSIGNMENT
KNOWLEDGE-TELLING CONTENT DISCOURSE KNOWL- PROCESS KNOWL- EDGE LOCATE TOPIC LOCATE GENRE EDGE IDENTIFIERS IDENTIFIERS
CONSTRUCT MEMORY PROBES
RETRIEVE CONTENT FROM MEMORY USING PROBES
FAIL RUN TESTS OF APPROPRIATENESS APPROPRIATENESS
WRITE (NOTES, DRAFT, ETC)
UPDATE MENTAL REPRESENTATION OF TEXT
REPRESENTATION OF TEXT
Figure 4 The knowledge-telling model (From Bereiter and Scardamilia, 1987, p.8)
64 MENTAL REPRESENTATION OF ASSIGNMENT
PROBLEM ANALYSIS AND GOAL SETTING
CONTENT KNOWLEDGE DISCOURSE KNOWLEDGE
CONTENT RHETORICAL PROBLEM PROBLEM SPACE PROBLEM TRANSLATION SPACE
PROBLEM TRANSLATION
KNOWLEDEG TELLING PROCESS
Figure 5 The knowledge-transforming model (From Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1987, p.12)
3.1.2.3 Kellogg’s model of working memory in writing
Among the models depicting the cognitive writing process, Kellogg’s
(1996) model related the writing process to general psychology most directly. It suggested that all specific writing processes work on the three components
65 depicted in Baddeley’s (1974) model of working memory in psychology.
Compare the two models in the next two figures in the figure.
Central Executive
Phonological Visual-Spatial Loop Sketchpad
Figure 6 Baddeley’s (1974) model of working memory
Formulation Execution Monitoring
Plan- Trans- Program- Execu- ning lating ming ting Read- Edit ing - ing ing
Visual-Spatial Central Phonological Sketchpad Execution Loop
Figure 7 Kellogg’s model of working memory in writing (1996, p.59)
From Figure 7, Kellogg’s (1996) model of working memory depicted three writing processes: formulation, execution and monitoring (He used the term “systems” here to distinguish the six more specific processes). These processes were each aligned the two basic levels, subordinate processes (Here
“processes”). The first process, formulation, involved planning and translating
66 rhetorical goals into text. The second process, execution, was actually about creating the text, either by writing it out by hand or word processing it. And the third process, monitoring, was comprised of reading and editing to evaluate and then revise text. The output of the prior process became the input for next processes, which might be near or distant from the prior process. And as the two figures show, Kellogg analyzed how the two slave systems of working memory in Baddeley’s model were differently engaged by the writing processes. In planning, writers might visualize images, organized diagrams and plans. So planning processes required access mainly to the visuospatial sketchpad. By contrast, translating, reading and editing imposed large demands on the phonological loop. Different from these two processes, execution engaged none of the slave systems. Kellogg emphasized the role of working memory that orchestrated these higher and more basic processes. According to
Kellogg, these processes operated simultaneously and affected the capacity of working memory, especially the central executive, as it was activated during most of these activities. In addition, it also permit interaction among the basic processing systems. For example, editing might take place prior to or following the execution. Kellogg insisted processing such as executing a word might take place at the same time with processing such formulation of new ideas or the monitoring of already written material. But he argued that this could be possible only when execution became automatic. While in contrast, formulating and monitoring processes were more controlled and effortful.
After analyzing studies in relation to writing models and working memory,
67 Kellogg summarized that expert writers usually had better over all memory capacity, because they had more developed skills needed to effectively compose texts which operated automatically, thereby easing any overload on their central executive. Novice or inexperienced writers, on the other hand, often got stuck because of their weak skill levels, which affected the all capacity of both their working memory and long-term memory capacities.
3.1.2.4 Comments
Even though they shared the common property of depicting the cognitive process of writing, the three prevalent writing models each had a specific focus.
Flower and Hayes’ model was oriented towards the general writing process of individual writers. Bereiter and Scardamalia’s model distinguished the different processes shown by novice and expert writers, a focus on the development of writing proficiency. And Kellogg’s model aimed at describing the demands of writing on working memory in adult and expert writing. It should be pointed out, however, that all these models attempted to offer a general model more suitable to L1 writing, but not L2 writing. In L1 writing, processes at all levels had a cognitive cost, although some were carried out automatically, which might pose a very minimal cost. For example, translating of pre-verbal ideas into written language might be more difficult for children than adult writers, the latter finding it more automatic, and consuming fewer cognitive resources.
In L2 writing where the L2 writers might still find the target language was by itself a part of learning, the carrying out of conceptual ideas through the language should become even more effortful and cognitive-loaded. Some
68 researchers (Whalen and Manard, 1995; Chenoweth and Hayes, 2001;
Schoonen et a1, 2003; Stevenson et a1, 2006) had assumed that “in L2 writing, lack of full proficiency in the L2 is likely to mean that the amount of noticing devoted to lower level processing will be greater than in L1, and this may inhibit the amount of noticing devoted to higher level processes, such as generating content and organizing this content into effective discourse
(Stevenson et al, 2006, p203)”. So the questions that L2 language posed on writing were “whether the models are still applicable to L2 writers with different L2 proficiency levels; in what ways L2 proficiency exerts extra influence on these processes in processing effort; and how L2 writing differs from L1 writing as cognitive processing is concerned, and so on. Another characteristic that these writing models have in common is the psychological assumption of writing as a complex problem-solving process where writing strategies are used to work out what one wants to achieve with the text and then decide how to do it step by step (Galbraith and Torrance, 1999; Rocade Larios et al., 2001). In this problem-solving process, writers are assumed to manipulate the sub processes and their corresponding mental representations to achieve the goals they set for themselves. The writing process is a top-down process, in which the general process of problem solving is made upon quite a lot of minor problems, may they be problems of writing down the correct word spelling, correct grammar, or appropriate organization and effective idea-conveying. Yet, some researchers argue that this may not be true, as writing is both a top-down and also a bottom-up process (Galbraith and
69 Torrance, 1999; Galbraith, 1999; Celce-Murica and Olshtain, 2000). Besides, questions as to “problem” in the problem-solving definition arise. In these models, the word “problem” is understood “as the distance between a perceived initial state and an intended goal state (Manchen, 1997)”. Then, what problems did writers find in their writing process? Whether there were any signs of explicit problems or not? When were these problems attended to, and what strategies were used to solve them? What was the process from finding a problem to solving it? Questions as such were waiting answers that the present problem-solving models had not offered.
As writing is considered a problem-solving activity, these models regard problem-solving strategies as the essential feature of writing expertise. These models tend to divide the whole process of writing into sub processes, and focus on the interplay among these sub processes and their relation with the working memory and the environment.
However, in comparison with these sub processes and strategies, the central executive or monitor component that supervises and controls the on-line scheduling of them has not received much attention. To put it another way, it is not their focus of attention as to how the monitor or executive works in the process. Questions as to how the central executive monitors the writing process, and what factors influence the monitoring, are beyond the interest of these models. Especially in L2 writing, the writing process may be more complex as a result of various additive variables, such as L2 proficiency, different educational practice, different teaching or learning methods, and soon, which
70 may influence the writing activity. In sum, most L1 writing process models have provided L2 writing research with systematically theoretical and experimental basis for an investigation over L2 writing process. But as shown above, even in the L1 writing field, it is far from drawing the conclusion on the nature of writing. L2 writing, which encompasses various additive variables than L1 writing, is claimed to be “uniquely characterizable specialty area that does not completely overlap but has ties to the fields of L1 writing instruction,
L2 acquisition, or L2 pedagogy (Kroll, 2003, p.11).” The study of L2 writing will in turn, contribute the understanding of the nature of writing that these L1 writing models work on.
3.2 Influencing factors of L2 writing ability
Given the findings on the L1 writing process, L2 writing research has endeavored to ascertain whether there are similarities between the mental processes in L1 and L2 writing, or whether L2 writing shows its own specificity. A crucial investigation has been done on whether the L2 proficiency imposes further constraints on the writing process that may create additional competing demands for noticing and also influence the type of problems attended to in L2 writing and the strategies used in the solution of these problems. The primary research aim has been set to discover whether L2 writing ability is a question of strategic competence transferred from L1 writing expertise or is linguistic competence determined by L2 proficiency.
Since the studies have been conducted in different contexts of L2 writing, that
71 is, ESL and EFL contexts, the factor of context seems to play a role too.
Therefore, to contextualize the present study, a review of EFL studies, particularly the EFL studies in writing in the Japanese and Chinese context, is needed.
3.2.1 L1 writing expertise
Most researchers seem to reach a consensus that writing ability can be shown in the writer’s strategy use in the writing process. With only a few exceptions showing no relation of the two (P. Pennington and So, 1993). In L2 writing research area, the term “process” was often discussed interchangeably with “strategies” (Sasaki and Hirose, 1996; Whalen and Manard, 1995), which was also defined as “writing behaviors” (Whalen, 1993), “problem-solving behaviors’’ (Cumming, 1989) and “composing behaviors” (Raimes, 1987) in various studies. As far as the present study was concerned, the term “process” includes any macro or micro processes and strategies that the writer implemented in the actual act of writing with no intent to distinguish from each other (Manchŏn, 1997). Early researchers compared L2 writing process with behaviors of native speakers in L1 writing research (Zamel, 1983; Raimes,
1985); later on, some compared the writers’ L2 writing in relation to their L1 writing expertise (Cumming, 1988, 1989); recently, more and more studies conducted within subject comparison of L1 and L2 writing processes in order to get more direct evidence (Whalen and Manard, 1995; Rocade Larios, et a1.,
2001, 2008; Manchŏn and Roca de Larios, 2007). These studies focused on either the writer’s general writing process in its entirety (Zamel, 1983; Raimes,
72 1985), or specific writing processes (Jones and Tee, 1987; Rocade Larios, et al.,
2006; Manchŏn and Roca de Larios, 2007).
The conclusions of these studies got mixed results. However, a great majority of them seemed to suggest that although L2 writing was more constrained and less effective than L1 composing, the processes and strategies involved in the writings of both languages were fairly comparable. Early studies on L2 writing attempted to describe all aspects of L2 writer’s writing process, especially behaviors that seemed to be successful or unsuccessful in producing an L2 composition (Leki, 1992). Zamel (1983) studied six advanced
L2 writers designated as skilled or unskilled as a result of essay writing.
Observing the writers’ writing process and interviewing them just after writing, she found that the skilled L2 writers revised more often and at the discourse level spent more time working on writing, attended to ideas first, and edited at the end of the process. All these behaviors were similar to those of skilled L1 writers, as described in L1 writing process studies in Pianko (1979) and
Sommers (1980). While in contrast, her unskilled L2 writers revised less and at the lower level, such as spelling, spent less time writing than the skilled ones, and edited throughout the whole process, representing the behaviors shown by the unskilled native writers in Sommers (1980). Raimes (1985) described the writing process of eight unskilled L2 writers and deemed their performances by a writing test. Using composing-aloud (that is, think-aloud in later studies) as a main data collecting method, and adapting Perl’s (cited in Raimes, 1985) coding scheme to analyze the data, she could compare the findings of this study
73 with other L1 writing research, especially Perl’s (cited in Raimes, 1985). She found that the L2 writers planned very little, a behavior similar to unskilled L1 writers. However, she also observed differences of her L2 writers from L1 writers in Pianko’s (1979) studies. Unlike the unskilled L1 writers in these two studies, her subjects wrote more, exhibited more commitment to the writing task, and paid more attention to generating ideas but gave less attention to form.
Raimes’s (1985, 1987) studies were significant in that before her, “L2 researchers had underscored the likenesses between L1 and L2 writers, both skilled and unskilled. Raimes suggested the adaptation rather than the whole sale adoption of L1 writing instruction (Krapels, 1990, p.45).” Later on, studies have begun to focus more on the L2 writer and to explore L2 writing taking more factors into consideration, such as the L2 writer’s L1 writing skills/expertise (Cumming, 1988, 1989) and comparing L1 and L2 writing processes of the L2 writer in order to get direct evidence of the relation between the writing in both languages. Cumming (1988, 1989) investigated the relationship between L1 writing expertise and L2 writing. Twenty-three
Francophone students of English, grouped into three levels of writing expertise in L1, as well as intermediate and advanced levels of oral proficiency in L2, wrote three compositions—letter, argument, and summary—in English. The results were that writing expertise affected both L2 writing process and product in that writers lacking in writing expertise showed the absence of differentiated control strategies, and most of them adopted a what-next strategy, bearing no overall mental model in their mind, and tended to pay attention to single
74 aspects of writing and wrote products of poor quality. In contrast, writers with professional level writing expertise could display various strategies productively and appropriately, attended to overall discourse and gist and showed great complexity of noticing, and thus wrote better L2 compositions.
He concluded that writing expertise was directly related to the writers’ strategy use in L2 writing and played a central role on L2 writing. He further suggested that writing expertise was a specially developed intelligence that could be applied across languages.
Cumming (1990) did a further study on the basis of his previous studies
(1988, 1989), in which mental linguistic and ideational thinking in L2 writing were discussed by analyzing statements attended to gist and language use concurrently. Participants’ heavy devotion, a little more than 30% of all reported decisions to thinking about their gist and language use concurrently, was suggested to show potential value for incidental learning of the second language. But quantitative analysis indicated that the frequency of these thinking episodes was only significantly related to learners’ writing expertise in their mother tongue, and L2 proficiency seemed to be unrelated. Even though
Cumming’s studies were highly controlled empirical studies, he acknowledged that “the congruence of the behaviors expert writers displayed in their L2 and
L1 does not necessarily mean writing expertise is performed in identical ways in people’s L1 and L2 (1988, p.180).” He then proposed a direct comparison of individuals writing in their two languages in pursuing this point in future research. From the late 1980s more and more researchers have conducted direct
75 comparison of Ll and L2 writing processes of the same subjects. In comparison with early L2 studies, the range of their studies has become wider. Some studies explored the specific strategies or microprocesses, such as planning
(Jones and Tetroe, 1987; Manchŏn and Roca de Larios, 2007), revising
(Stevenson et a1., 2006), and formulating (Rocade Larios et al., 2001; Roca de
Larios et a1., 2006). Some dealt with the general process in more depth through examining the different levels of processes (Whalen and Manard, 1995;
Stevenson et a1., 2006); depicting processes in relation to composing time
(Rocade Larios et a1., 2008); and some adopted computer technique to help them collect data (Thorson, 2000; Stevenson et a1., 2006).
Jones and Tetroe (1987) investigated what L2 writers do in planning.
Based on a think-aloud protocol analysis of six L2 writers writing in both L1 and L2, they found that the writers transferred both good and weak strategies from L1 to L2, and they tended to do more planning in their L1 but worked “at the same level of abstraction in both languages.” Consequently, they argued that this transfer of strategies from L1 writing was independent of L2 language proficiency, which only affected the quantity and not the quality of planning.
Thus, they claimed that the writing strategies in L1 transferred to L2 writing play a central role. Similar results were found in Whalen and Manard’s (1995) study. In their study, 12 students with the same level of L2 proficiency were asked to write an argumentative text in both L1 (English) and L2 (French).
Their writing processes were compared as to the planning, evaluation and revising strategies at three levels: the pragmatic, the textual and the linguistic
76 levels. As planning was concerned, linguistic processing constrained the quantity, but not the quality, of upper-level processing. Evaluation at surface levels increased and textual and pragmatic evaluation processing dropped down sharply in L2 than in L1. But as linguistic revising was taken under consideration, difference in quality arose—there were more local level revisions appearing in L2 than in L1. Therefore, although the results showed that the same writer used the same writing strategies at a quantitatively identical rate in both L1 and L2. Further analyses revealed that the linguistic constraints imposed some striking difference till the strategies were being manipulated when the students wrote in both languages. They argued that the state of the writer’s strategic knowledge and capacity for meaningful multiple-level discourse processing explained these constraining effects. More recently, a group of researchers (Rocade Larios, Manch`on and Murphy) have worked together and presented a much more comprehensive description of the
L2 writing process. In their series of studies, L2 writing process was compared with the L2 writer’s L1 writing process and was investigated in relation to L2 proficiency from a temporal dimension.
Besides, various processes and strategies were discussed, such as planning
(Manchŏn and Rocade Larios, 2007), formulating (Rocade Larios et a1., 2001;
Roca de Larioseta1., 2006), restructuring (Rocade Larios et a1., 1999), backtracking (Manch`on et a1., 2000), and the general L2 writing processes
(Rocade Larios et a1., 2008). Applying an approach from a temporal perspective (i.e. time spent on planning operations), Manch`on and Roca de
77 Larios (2007) explored 21 Spanish ESL writers’ planning behavior while engaged in academic writing tasks in L1 and L2. The study found that the L2 writers tended to allocate similar percentages of composing time to planning regardless of the language of writing. This finding lent support for previously cross-linguistic similarities in planning such as to the abstraction levels of planning (Jones and Tetroe, 1987) and the processing of discourse at a multiple level (Whalen and Manard, 1995). They suggested that this cross-linguistic similarity could be interpreted as another manifestation of composing competence (p.574) and corresponded to Cummins’ (1980) conception of
CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency). Similar results were received in this group of researchers’ temporal investigation on the formulation processes of the same participants L1 and L2 writing (Rocade Larios et al.,
2001). In this study the participants showed the same total formulation time in
L1 and L2 writing, a finding contradicting Pennington and So (1993) showed that writers spent more time on writing in their L1 than L2. It seemed that most studies found that L1 writing and L2 writing are similar, and consequently, some proposed the transfer of writing competence from L1 to L2; but several studies found a back-transfer effect of L2 writing to L1 writing as well
(Manch`on and Roca de Larios, 2007). No matter what influenced L1 and L2 writing had on each other, both jointly supported the assumption of the existence of a common underlying composing competence independent of languages, but manifested in the strong specific language. The second point was that even though the processes were basically the same, there were also
78 obvious differences between the two. Valdes et al. (1992) assumed that much more was involved than a single transfer of “common” literacy skills. As a result, many researchers (Leki, 1992; Silva, 1993; Grabe and Kaplan, 1996) called for further study. For instance, Grabe and Kaplan (1996) argued that
“While there are similarities between L1 and L2 students of writing, there are also differences which must be recognized if research implications and practical instruction are to be most appropriate for the needs of L2 learner
(p.23).”
3.2.2 L2 proficiency
Abundant studies have been done in order to discover the alleged specificity of L2 writing (Silva, 1993; Whalen and Manard, 1995; Rocade
Larios et al., 2001). One of the mostly studied aspects was the L2 writer’s general L2 proficiency. Yet, mixed results were offered. In some previous studies, L2 proficiency was not regarded as an influential factor. For example,
Raimes (1985) and Zamel (1983) found that the quality of students’ writing was not related to their L2 proficiency. In contrast, some studies found L2 proficiency plays a certain role in L2 writing, but the degree of the influence varied. Some found that it only plays an additive influence on the L2 writing quality, the little influence on the writing process (Cumming, 1988, 1989,
1990); some found a major role of L2 proficiency on L2 writing (Sasaki and
Hirose, 1996); some argued that L2 proficiency is the only factor that affects
L2 writing ability (Pennington and So, 1993). Raimes’s (1985, 1987) studies examined the relationship between L2 language proficiency and L2 writing
79 skills. She found that there was no clear correspondence between the two: students with high L2 proficiency were not necessarily good L2 writers.
Cumming (1988, 1989) found that“writing expertise is regarded as a central cognitive ability the second language proficiency adding to it, facilitating it in a new domain, and possibly enhancing it (1989, p.121).” Besides, there was no interaction of the L1 writing expertise and L2 proficiency. He argued that:
“there were no significant interactions between the two factors, these analyses indicate that writing expertise and second language proficiency each make quite different contributions to the processes and products of writing in a second language. Indeed, it would appear writing expertise and second language proficiency are psychologically different (p.118)”and “both seem to contribute different elements to second language writing performance (p.124).”
In contrast to Cumming but similar to Valdes et a1. (1992), Sasaki and Hirose’s
(1996) study discovered that the development of target language proficiency interacted with writing skills developed in a first language. In this study, 70
Japanese students were asked to write two expository essays in English and
Japanese. The results showed that L2 proficiency accounted for as much as
52% of the participants’ L2 writing ability variance. Compared the other two variables of L1 writing ability and meta knowledge of L2 writing that were investigated in the study, it was the largest explanatory variable of L2 writing ability. Besides, L1 writing ability and L2 proficiency were interactive with each other because of the existence of a significantly moderate correlation.
They accounted for the discrepancy as different measures of second language
80 proficiency or the different backgrounds of second language learning of the subjects in these two studies. Sasaki and Hirose adopted some of the comprehension competencies and Cumming tested his subjects’ L2 proficiency from their oral performance; Sasaki and Hirose’s subjects were learning in the
EFL context, whereas Cumming investigated French learning English in an
ESL environment. Attempting to explore how linguistic ability and cognitive ability interacted to affect the writing task, Yau (1991) investigated the writing processes of three groups of Chinese ESL writers in writing an expository essay.
The results showed that the writer’s level of linguistic knowledge did affect the conceptual content of L2 writing and that the higher the level of L2 knowledge, the more complex the idea chunk and syntax produced in L2 writing. Yau suggested that writing performance was as much a result of the students’ use of strategies as it was of their L2 proficiency. Pennington and So (1993) compared the L1 and L2 writing processes and products of six Singaporean university students in order to find out if a relationship existed between the writer’s process skill and product quality. Different from most studies, they examined the process and product data separately. Interesting results were found—there was no relationship between process and product in either language, nor between products in the two languages, but there was a similarity in the writing processes. Besides, they found there was a clear relationship between the writer’s L2 proficiency and the quality of their writing products. L2 proficiency seemed to be the only factor, among the other three studied, the L1 writing process, L2 writing process, L1 writing products, that affected the quality of the
81 L2 writing products in this study. Sasaki (2000) conducted a longitudinal study on three paired groups of Japanese EFL writers (experts versus novices, more-versus 1ess-skilled student writers, novices before versus after 6 months of instruction). These participants were compared in terms of writing fluency, quality/complexity of their written texts, their pausing behaviors while writing, and their strategy use. The results revealed obvious difference between the experts and novices in that before starting to write, the experts spent a longer time planning a detailed overall organization, whereas the novices spent a shorter time, making a less global plan; once the experts had made their global plan, they did not stop and as frequently as the novices. Sasaki also speculated that L2 proficiency appeared to explain part of the difference in strategy use between the experts and novices in that the novices often stopped to translate the generated ideas into English whereas the experts often stopped to refine their English expression. Roca de Larios et a1. (2008) reported a study examining 21 Spanish writers’ strategic behaviors in the allocation of time in the L2 (English) writing processes. Two specific questions were raised: whether the writer’s proficiency level influenced the total processing time devoted to writing processes and whether different proficiency groups allocated their time differently to different writing processes at three periods. Both similarities and differences were found. All the participants allocated statistically different amount of time to most of the composing activities they engaged in. Among the seven composing activities studied, formulation took up the most of their time, from over 80% for the lower level to 65% for the
82 intermediate and over 62% for the advanced group. Despite the similarities, there were also important differences shown with different proficiency levels: there was a tendency toward a more balanced allocation of time to the different composing processes as L2 proficiency increased. As to the second research question, L2 proficiency again affected the allocation of time to different writing processes at different periods. Participants with lower proficiency level maintained the same pattern of time allocation throughout the different stages in the whole process. Only two composing activities he was reading, the prompt and meta comments were found to be allocated significantly differently at different stages: reading the prompt was carried out mostly in the initial stage of the composition; on the contrary, meta comments were predominant in the third stage. However, the intermediate and advanced groups showed a more diversified time allocation to different processes more directly related to the act of composing. For example, revising most often occurred at the final stage, formulation reached the highest in the second period, and planning decreased significantly from the initial to the second and the least in the final stage. They concluded that the difference in the temporal allocation of composing behaviors appeared because of the participants’ L2 proficiency level.
3.2.3 L2 writing in the EFL context
Taking the study of L2 writing in the Chinese EFL Context as an example.
Wang (2004) attempted to reveal the English writing process of sixteen tertiary-level English majors in order to find out how they used L1 when composing in L2 and to what extent their use of L1 was affected by their L2
83 proficiency and the different types of writing tasks: The study found that these students manifested different amount of L1 use to deal with different composing activities. For instance, amount of L1 used to generate ideas was more than to examine the task requirements．
Besides, more L1 use was found in the narrative than in the argumentative writing tasks and the amount of L1 use decreased with the going up of L2 proficiency. Recently, a comprehensive study on the Chinese EFL writers’ strategy use in the English writing process was conducted by J. Wang (2005).
The study investigated the writing processes of eighteen non-English majors at three different levels of L2 proficiency. She found that all the students employed a wide range of writing strategies to varying degrees. There appeared a general descending tendency in the numbers of strategies and their frequency occurrence as L2 proficiency moved up. The findings suggested that heavy use of writing strategies put more interruptions on the flow of writing and interfered to the overall unity of the text.
3.2.4 Comments
As to the primary research aim set by L2 writing studies, it seems that L2 writing is both related to L1 writing expertise, which is generally reflected in the strategies used in the writing processor in the quality of L1 writing products on the one hand, and constrained by the writer’s L2 proficiency on the other.
Yet the research findings reveal major contradictions (Krapels, 1990) and still
“no clear and satisfactory account of L2 writing processes has yet emerged”
(Thorson, 2000, p.155). Possible reasons for the inconsistency of the research
84 findings are summarized as follows. First of all, as most of the insights and suggestions offered by the extant research have been drawn in a context of ESL writers, one is left to wonder whether the same will apply in an EFL situation
(Victori, 1999). In fact, some researchers (Valdes, 1992; Cumming, 1988, 1989;
Kamimura, 1996; Victori, 1999) have also called in question the similarity between ESL and EFL writing and have wondered whether ESL findings on writing will also hold true for EFL writers. This is particularly questionable in terms of L2 proficiency. In an ESL context, where English is the native and dominant language used in and out of school, English proficiency is attached much more importance in the L2 writer’s life and study. However, in an EFL context, the L2 writer may not have full access to English resources, such as
English native speakers as teachers or peers. Besides, the opportunities of practicing the target language in real communication are very rare. So it comes as no surprise that, compared to an ESL context, less EFL students are found whose communicative competence in English closely resembles that of native speakers (Victori, 1995, p.7)．Considering that the overall level of English that
EFL students attain maybe less proficient, linguistic difference may exert more significance in EFL writing than they seem to be for ESL writing. In fact, some studies have already suggested this impact. For example, Sasaki and Hirose’s
(1996) EFL students’ L2 proficiency was formed to be the most influential factor in their L2 writing, but Cumming (1989) claimed L2 proficiency affected
French students’ L2 writing only in an additive way. Besides, in most studies, the subjects’ first language, most often French or Spanish, belonged to the same
85 language family, the Indo-European family, in which the target language
English and their native language shared a similar alphabetic system; nevertheless, the few EFL studies that existed were mostly Japanese, which belonged to the Altaic language family, and made use of a combination of ideograms and syllabic writing. Still fewer studies had been conducted as to languages in different language families, for instance, Chinese. Chinese is a language in the Sino-Tibetan language family, which is a character system. It is easy to see the great difference in written English and written Chinese. Another difference between an ESL and EFL context has to do with the different writing instruction in different settings. It has been suggested that since many ESL learners have been brought up and living under the same educational and cultural system as native speakers, the writing skills they have developed could be similar to those English native speakers (Uzawa and Cumming, 1989). In contrast, an EFL learner learns how to write in a foreign language mostly in a formal educational context where writing instruction may be influenced by factors of the writer’s native language writing or culture. The influence of the mother tongue is especially evident when considering the sharp difference between the two languages found by the contrastive rhetoricians, starting from
Kaplan (1966, 1972). A typical case was Chinese students’ writing in English.
It could be argued that under the influence of Chinese writing instruction of what characters constituted a piece of good writing, the Chinese students tended to pay more attention to beautiful expressions and they tended to develop their text in a circular way, as some contrastive rhetoricians had argued.
86 That might explain in part why both L2 writing process researchers (Penninton and So 1993) and contrastive rhetoricians (Liebman, 1992) stressed more on research on the L2 writers’ L1 writing instruction and their previous experience in L1 writing. Some ESL studies examined students from different language backgrounds and residing at the target language country for different duration.
This heterogeneity of subjects made it difficult to explore the relationship between a student’s education and experiences in the culture and institutions of
L1 and L2 writing ability. Contradictory conclusions were drawn. For example,
Raimes (1987) found that her subjects’ year of residence in the L2 country did not correspond to their writing proficiency in the L2. In contrast, Cumming
(1988, 1989) found that the participants’ writing ability was consistent with their time of residence. Fewer studies had been conducted on EFL students’ L2 writing in relation to their common characters in L1 education and experience.
What’s more, there was no study of Chinese EFL students’ L2 writing as to their common cultural and educational backgrounds in writing in both L1 and
L2. Yet, it was generally recognized that Chinese students made up a fairly homogeneous group in terms of their formal L1 learning experience, their learning history in Chinese writing and English proficiency learning, and
English writing, with the exception that some had English writing courses and more years of English study. By studying a homogeneous group of L2 writers, the relations of L2 writing to L1 writing and to L2 proficiency would become clearer. The second reason accounting for the mixed results might be the different methodologies used by abundant research. Some studies did not take
87 the L2 writer’s L2 proficiency into consideration (Uzawa, 1996). Even when
L2 proficiency was included, it was estimated with different measuring methods. Some adopted a comprehensive test which includes grammar, vocabulary and reading (Raimes, 1987; Victori, 1995, 1999); some added listening to it (Bosher, 1998); some relied on the subjects’ oral proficiency
(Cumming, 1989), and still some tested oral and written proficiency (Qi and
Lapkin, 2001). As can be seen, different criteria for L2 proficiency led to different findings as to the role of L2 proficiency in L2 writing.
Similarly, some studies (Sasaki and Hirose, 1996) did not show a strict control of L1 writing ability, its influence on L2 writing was assumed in an ad hoc fashion. Thus, as Manchŏn and Roca de Larios (2007) suggested that future research would have to take into account the independent contributions of L2 proficiency and L1 writing ability so as to arrive at warranted results about L2 writing and its relationship to L2 proficiency and L1 writing. Another weakness in-methodology shared by some studies was the indirect comparison of L1 and L2 writing processes. Some studies compared the L2 writer’s writing behaviors with native speakers’ writings in L1 writing studies; some compared their subjects with the subjects in other L2 studies. However, even though illuminative findings had been yielded, direct evidence from within-subject comparison was required to explain the nature of L2 writing.
Many studies of L2 writing were also limited in the monolingual approach to data gathering. Though several studies suggested a change in this trend
(Cumming, 1989; Uzawa, 1996), in many studies, participants not only wrote
88 but also engaged in think-aloud or were interviewed in their second language
(Raimes 1987). This was especially interruptive because many L2 writers were reported to think in their native language as they compose. To think aloud in their L2 language might result in cognitive overload and distortion of the writing process (Bosher, 1998). One of the reasons for asking their subjects to use L2 in their think-aloud might be that in an ESL context, subjects might be heterogenous in native languages. Therefore, to observe authentic writing process, the subjects should be allowed to use any language they feel natural in their thinking flow. The third reason might be the study focus that most writing studies had set. Beating in mind that a good writer was someone who possesses good strategies, while a weak writer did not have enough strategies at play, most studies investigated the L2 writer’s composing strategies or writing behaviors as shown in the writing process, or the macro- or micro-processes.
Most probably with the notion in classical writing models that writing was basically problem-solving. However, little research had been done studying exactly what problems a writing task imposed on L2 writers for them to use certain strategies. Questions as to what exact roles these strategies played in solving what specific problems were rarely touched upon. To the best knowledge of the researcher of the present study, till now, there were only two empirical studies (Rocade Larios et a1., 2001, 2006) that had attempted to specify the problems explicitly shown in the writing process. This was one huge step forward in that the findings of these two studies offered direct evidence for the basic assumption made by classical writing models. In
89 addition, most studies were only concerned with establishing the distribution and amount of some strategic behaviors and did not attribute high importance to the discussion of the underlying psycholinguistic reasons for these behaviors.
The final point to be addressed was that besides the influencing factors such as
L1 writing ability and L2 proficiency, other factors also influenced L2 writing.
Yet most process research focused on the cognitive process of the L2 writers, and confined themselves from external factors, such as cultural factors, personality, writing experiences with L2 and L1, etc. In fact, things like personality, educational context, cultural background, purpose of writing, audience, and the nature of the topic were thought to have a great effect on the act of writing. For example, Mohan and Lo (1985) proposed that future research should compare the teaching of composition in first and second language in the same educational system. Grabe and Kaplan (1996) also emphasized that many additional variables introduced in L2 contexts—not only cognitive but also social, cultural and educational—should be considered in L2 writing studies in order to gain a better description on the specificity of L2 writing. Hence, one might reasonably infer that factors other than L1 writing ability and L2 proficiency might account for the contradictory results obtained in various writing studies which did not include those factors. In view of the contradictory research findings in L2 writing, more exploration was needed.
Future research should take into consideration variables such as the strict control of L1 writing ability and L2 proficiency, and external factors such as the EFL education with all the context and writing instruction of L1 and L2
90 writings. Moreover, instead of studying the strategic actions or behaviors as shown in the process, research needed to move a step back to study what problems caused the strategies and to relate strategic behaviors to underlying psycholinguistic processes. Being thus a strongly integrative activity, understanding how writers composed a text does not only consisted of descriptions of the processes underlying written production but also in explaining how their activation was orchestrated in the cognitive system, whose main characteristic was its limited capacity in maintaining and processing information simultaneously. One good perspective was to study attentional behaviors in the writing process, as attention was critical in the central executive and monitors all sub-processes and strategies the writer implements. In other words, the writer first of all switched attention on something and decided whether it was problematic or not, and then employed strategies or knowledge from the long term memory to the working memory to deal with the writing task. In fact, there had been several studies attempting to explore the nature of L2 writing from this perspective, as would be addressed in the next section．
3.3 Study of noticing in L1 and L2 writings
3.3.1 Swain’s Output Hypothesis
Swain (2008) has made a complete and new analysis of Output
Hypothesis. She claimed that the act of producing language (speaking or writing) constituted, under certain circumstances, part of the process of second
91 language learning. Also, the processes involved in producing language could be quite different from those involved in comprehending language and so must be considered separately from them. One function of producing the target language in the sense of practicing was that it enhances fluency. As this seemed noncontroversial, particularly if it was not confused with the proverb that practice made perfect, she would not discuss this role further now. We knew that fluency and accuracy werere different dimensions of language performance, and although practice might enhance fluency, it did not necessarily improve accuracy (Ellis, 1985). So, Swain focused on the three functions of output that she proposed in 1995.
First, output had a noticing/triggering function. The claim here was that while attempting to produce the target language (vocally or silently
(subvocally)), learners might notice that they did not know how to say (or write) precisely the meaning they wish to convey. In other words, under some circumstances, the activity of producing the target language might prompt second language learners to notice or recognize consciously some of their linguistic problems: it might bring their attention to something they needed to discover about their second language (possibly directing their attention to relevant input). This awareness triggered cognitive processes that had been implicated in second language learning ones in which learners generated linguistic knowledge which was new for them, or which consolidated their current existing knowledge (Swain and Lapkin, 1995). There had been a number of carefully designed, experimental studies which had examined the
92 effect of output on noticing and acquisition of particular target forms, including my research and my student’s research (Izumi, 2002). Second, the output had a hypothesis testing function. The claim here was that output might sometimes be, from the learner’s perspective, a trial ran reflecting their hypothesis of how to say (or write) their intent. Mackey’s (2006) study had an excellent example of hypothesis testing from a learner’s perspective. The learner was reacting to an interaction episode in which she, another learner, and a teacher were involved.
During this episode, among other things, the learner was trying to figure out both the meaning of suite and how to say it. If learners were not testing hypotheses, then changes in their output would not be expected following feedback. That was also related to the third function of output—the metalinguistic (reflective) function of output. The claim here was that using language to reflect on language produced by others or the self-mediates’ second language learning. This idea originated with Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of mind. Sociocultural theory was about people operating with mediating tools
(Wertsch, 1985). Speaking was one such tool in this context. Swain (2000,
2005) had relabeled output as speaking, writing, collaborative dialogue, private speech, verbalizing, and/or language in order to escape the inhibiting effect of the conduct metaphor implied in the use of terms such as input and output
(Firth and Wagner, 1997; Kramsch, 1995).
In her research (Kowal and Swain, 1997; Swain and Lapkin, 1998, 2002, in press), Swain had experimented with tasks which encouraged students to engage in collaborative dialogue and found that tasks where students were
93 asked to write something together tended to elicit collaborative dialogue as the students discuss how best to represent their intended meaning. Furthermore, she had shown through the use of posttest items based on the students collaborative dialogues that the collaborative dialogues were a source of language learning. Speaking also completed thought. Vygotsky, Barnes (1992),
Wells (1999), and others had argued that speech could serve as a means of development by reshaping experience. Speaking serves as a vehicle through which thinking was articulated, transformed into an artifactual form, and as such was then available as a source of further reflection (Smagorinsky, 1998:
172) , as an object about which questions could be raised and answers could be explored with others or with themselves. As Smagorinsky (1998:172,173) said, the process of rendering thinking into speech was not simply a matter of memory retrieval, but a process through which thinking reached a new level of articulation. Ideas were crystallized and sharpened, and inconsistencies became more obvious.
Over the last few decades, there has been a shift in meaning from output as product to output as process, a shift that created the need for some new metaphors, new research questions, and a new respect for our research tools. If, just for example, verbalization had the impact on second language learning, then research tools such as think alouds and stimulated recalls, needed to be understood as part of the learning process, not just as a medium of data collection (Swain 2002). Think alouds and stimulated recalls were not, as some would have it, brain dumps; rather they were a process of comprehending and
94 reshaping experience they were part of what constitutes learning. Information processing theory and sociocultural theory both provided valuable insights about mind and memory. The researchers should take full advantage of each theory for the insights each had provided, and for the many each had yet to inspire concerning the role of language production in second language learning.
As Lantolf (1996) suggested, different theories afforded different insights well; several directions could be taken. Experimental studies within an information processing framework would seem particularly fruitful. Investigation of the levels and types of processing output, under different conditions’ engenders seemed to be a particularly interesting route to pursue. Within a sociocultural theory of mind framework, ethnographic and case study approaches would seem to be more valuable at this point in time, although there was certainly a place for experimental work. Particularly useful to understand processes and strategies of second language learning would be studies of the collaborative dialogue and private speech of learners as they worked to solve language-related problems they faced in their language production, be they at the level of morphology, syntax, discourse, pragmatics, or conceptualization of ideas. By studying the collaborative dialogue and private speech of learners, according to a Vygotskian sociocultural theory of mind, we were observing learning in progress. The considerable sociocultural interests were other broader questions about verbalizing, or languaging. Languaging was the use of language to work through cognitively complex thoughts. For example, if verbalizing/languaging was such an important cognitive tool, could its use help
95 prevent memory loss? This was an issue we were currently investigating. Our current research took us into long term care facilities where we interacted on a one to one basis with socially isolated elderly adults. These adults had very little or no opportunity, to interact in any cognitively complex way with others; that is, they had no opportunities to language in their daily lives. They were also individuals who were showing a decline in the incognitive and affective behaviour, but were not considered as having any form of dimension. To our data, which consisted of hours and hours of recordings between one of the research team and our participants, suggested both positive affective and cognitive consequences. Other important questions for the future included the roles language had indistributing cognition. In what ways did the setting and context constrainer enhanced learners’ opportunities to language? The most significant new understanding for me in studying language production was just how very important it was as a cognitive tool, as a tool which mediated our thinking, an activity of language. Collaborative dialogue and private speech were examples of language. The concept of language, of using language to mediate cognitively complex ideas, greatly widened our second and foreign language learning and teaching research agenda. The application could focus on the fact that the students should use the language, such as, to talk. The good activities were those where students had to produce something as a result of their talking, for example, a writing task. They talked about the writing task, and then they had to produce final products in English. Any activities that had students talk, particularly when students reflected about their speaking or
96 writing, were good activities. If students were not expected to rewrite their essays, most likely they put them away without reading the written feedback. It would be much more conducive to their language learning if they had to go through and reflect on the feedback , that is, talked about why it was given and what to do about it. The active reflecting was very important for L2 learning.
The classroom context in Japan and China is quite different from that in
Canada. For large classes, pair work or small group work may give students more opportunities to use English and deepen their understanding of the target language points. For example, the teacher can ask students to talk about the feedback in pairs as part of class activities. The teacher then walks around and sees if the students have any questions. Students can ask questions, but they need to list their questions and talk about the questions. So they can both have an opportunity to talk about and try to understand the feedback. If they cannot work it out, they then turn to their teacher. In this way, the whole class can benefit from reading and discussing the feedback. Another important aspect is that the teachers should understand that their students might not do what they require them to do. As our research reveals, more often, students have their own agenda. Because of their own learning histories, they will decide what they want to take from what the teachers say in the class. Often, many teachers complain that their students keep making the same mistakes in their assignments such as speaking or writing tasks. They neglect one important aspect in language teaching, that is, students are agents in this whole process of teaching and learning. Teachers should take into account the learner factors in
97 their teaching activities.
3.3.2 The psychological mechanism of noticing in L1 writing
Discussions on the role of noticing capacity in L1 writing have mainly drawn on the central assumption of Baddeley’s model in cognitive psychology that working memory is of limited capacity, so both time and cognitive effort must be allocated to a mental process unless it can operate automatically, independent of the limitation of noticing. The working memory is composed of three components, namely, a central executive, the phonological loop and the visual sketchpad, among which the central executive coordinates cognitive processes through attentional control. By activating some processes and inhibiting others, a trade-off across processes occurs. A consensus reached in
L1 writing is that people can pay active attention to a limited number of writing activities at a time, due to capacity limitations (Kellogg, 1996; Ransdell and
Levy, 1996). Beyond that, the writer’s noticing becomes overloaded and thus restricts higher order processes. Van der Hoeven’s (1999) study examined differences in the distribution of generating activities within 31 young students of the same age, and the effect these differences had on text quality. The results showed that there were differences in the distribution of generating activities, resulting in compositions of different quality. Moreover, linguistic skills and evaluative skills influenced this distribution. A writer who paid much attention to spelling because of his low linguistic or evaluative skill had to reduce the cognitive load by giving less noticing to other aspects of the writing process, such as conceptual planning. In contrast, writers with high linguistic and/or
98 evaluative skills could have certain processes running automatically, such as spelling, and thus focus on more higher-order processing, resulting in a more processing flexibility.
3.3.3 The role of noticing in L2 writing
The issue of how the writer uses different strategies in the writing process has been one of the most widely explored aspects of the writing process research．However, the role of noticing in both L1 and L2 writing processes has been a neglected area of investigation. It is especially true of L2 writing; yet several most recent studies have attempted to relate the psycholinguistic process of L2 writing with theories of noticing in SLA and cognitive psychology, thus deepening writing research into how writers operate their noticing resources and how their working memory functions during performance.
In L2 writing, lacking in full proficiency in L2, a writer may devote more noticing to lower level processing than in L1, and this may inhibit noticing available for higher level processes, such as generating the content into effective discourse (Chenoweth and Hayes, 2001; Whalen and Manard, 1995;
Schoonen et a1., 2003). Most L2 studies of this kind were concerned with examining the relation of attention, or noticing to the L2 development of writing, or how some factors, such as L1 writing expertise and L2 proficiency, affected the allocation of noticing, and consequently, the final product.
Analyzing the participants’ decision statements in the think-aloud data in three writing tasks Cumming (1989) focused on four aspects of writing, the students
99 attended to, namely language use, discourse organization, gist, and procedure for writing and five categories of problem-solving behaviors: heuristic searchers with and without resolution, problem resolution, problem identification, and knowledge telling. The study showed that the students’ noticing patterns and problem-solving behaviors while writing differed according to their L1 writing expertise and the type of tasks they were involved in. L2 writers with low L1 writing expertise exhibited a lack of control over their writing process. In contrast, the expert writers were able to make decision about the gist and organization with confidence and facility, and subsequently could devote much noticing to how to use appropriate language to express their intended meaning.
In comparison to the central cognitive role L1 writing expertise played in the L2 writing, L2 proficiency was only an additive factor that did not entail qualitative changes in the writing processes. Similar results were drawn in a more recent study conducted by Bosher (1998). Basically using Cumming’s
(1988, 1989) coding systems, but adopting stimulated retrospective protocols as data, Bosher examined the L2 writing processes of three Southeast Asian
ESL college students with different educational backgrounds. The statistical analysis of collected data revealed difference among the subjects in relation to problem-solving strategies and the amount and degree of noticing students paid to various aspects of their writing. One student with the higher L2 proficiency attended to the content (gist) of her writing many more times than another student; and this student was more concerned with the organization of her essay
100 than the third one. The one with the lowest L2 proficiency noticed basically to surface features in the writing, whereas the other two noticed primarily to the content and organization aspects.
Recently there seems to be a trend of adopting theories of noticing in SLA to explain the L2 writing process, thus providing a solid theoretical basis for the empirical research. Finding support from theories in SLA, specifically,
Schmidt’s “conscious attention” and Swain’s “i+1 output” hypothesis, Uzawa
(1996) compared learners’ L1 writing, L2 writing, and their translation from L1 into L2. Focusing on noticing patterns meta-cognitive level, discourse level, linguistic level and meta-comments in writing and translating processes, the study found that the noticing patterns in the L1 and L2 writing tasks were very similar, but different in the translation task. Noticing to language use in the translation task was significantly higher than in the L1 and L2 writing tasks. It yielded different results from that of Cumming: Cumming reported that expert writers in his study paid “conspicuous” attention to words while writing in the
L2 even though they lacked proficiency in their second language, whereas
Uzawa’s students noticed the words little in both language writing tasks. One possible reason might be that Uzawa did not consider either L1 writing expertise or L2 proficiency of her subjects.
3.3.4 Comments
Compared to various strategies or subprocesses in L2 writing, the noticing mechanism had been scarcely investigated. However, even the few extant studies directly examining the role of noticing in L2 writing exposed several
101 weaknesses. For most of these studies, the writer’s noticing mechanism was only depicted superficially, with no discussion in relation to its psychological function in the working memory.
Secondly, the results of these studies were not consistent. This might be explained from the different study biases and measuring tools. For example, in some studies, L2 development in writing was examined from the linguistic aspect only—specifically, fluency, lexical density, grammatical complexity and accuracy. But as is commonly agreed upon, the criteria for writing competence contained not only language knowledge, but also content and discourse knowledge; it was only unreliable to judge L2 writing development on the language aspect. Moreover, the writer’s noticing behaviors were again focused primarily on linguistic aspects, namely, lexical, grammatical and spelling, while neglecting other major aspects, such as content and discourse organization. It seemed that these studies’ total adoption of some criteria of noticing in SLA, especially, from Swain and Lapkin’s (1995) were not completely applicable to
L2 writing investigation.
Finally, all of these studies only investigated noticing from a uni-dimensional, horizontal study of the distribution oral location; yet as some studies had discovered (Whalen and Menard, 1995), the L2 writer’s noticing capacity might vary according to different levels of aspects. These studies did not examine the role of noticing in depth, as none of them attempted to discuss the degree of the noticing effort. Therefore, a multidimensional approach, both horizontal and vertical, should be applied to the study of noticing, for example,
102 the degree of noticing. Since previous studies scarcely explored this area and mixed results were obtained, research was greatly needed to discover how noticing monitors the writing process, and whether L2 proficiency or L1 writing expertise exerted additional impact on it.
3.4 Specific research cases on noticing in L2 writing
Based on the study of noticing in L2 writing, noticing has also been discussed in some researchers’ specific cases. However, those research on noticing in L2 writing are very similar to the research on attention under the influence of noticing hypothesis.
3.4.1 Swain and Lapkin’s case
Swain and Lapkin (1995) first put forward the question about what aspects of language L2 writers noticed. Their empirical study explored the role of output in L2 writing context, and examined whether the learners’ output could lead them to become aware of language problems they encountered in writing.
The participants, French-immersion students in Canada, were asked to think aloud whatever was on their mind in L2 composition. After analysis of think-aloud protocols, the units called “language-related episodes (LREs)” were identified and classified into several groups according to the different types of language problems. Based on the results above, they made a conclusion that “noticing may occur because of either internal or external feedback which may prompt, for example, the generation of alternatives and assessment of them through simple inspection to complex thinking”.
103 3.4.2 Qi and Lapkin’s case
Qi and Lapkin (2001) examined the role of noticing and reformulation as feedback with a three-stage L2 writing task consisting of composing, comparing and revising L2. They invited two Chinese ESL students with different proficiency levels to think aloud whatever they noticed at the stage of comparing the learners’ own texts with the reformulated version of them. The think-aloud protocols were analyzed and categorized into form, lexical, and discourse LREs. The results of this experiment indicated that there was a certain difference in the frequency of each LRE between high proficient and low proficient learners. These two researchers also found that the high proficient student noticed with a higher level of awareness than the low proficient student. And they also believed that the reformulation technique allowed learners to notice a gap between their inter-language and target language by comparing their own texts with the reformulated texts.
3.4.3 Hanaoka’s case
Based on Qi and Lapkin’s above study (2001), Hanaoka (2007) investigated the role of model texts in promoting noticing in four stages consisting of output, comparison, and two revision stages. In the comparison stage, Japanese ESL students in a university English course were asked to write on whatever they noticed as they compared their original texts with the models.
The data was classified into four categories: content, grammar, lexis, and other.
The results of this study indicated that the participants noticed the lexical aspects much more than the other three categories. A further obvious result
104 showed that the participants noticed their linguistic problems and found some solutions from the models of their own free will.
3.4.4 Cumming and Griffin’s case
The research in second language acquisition supplies a theoretical basis to the study of attention in L2 writing. However, so far, the study of attention in
L2 writing has been studied by few scholars. (Cumming, 1989; Qi and Lapkin,
2001; Griffin, 2004). In fact, in this study, attention is equal to noticing.
Cumming (1989) described the processes of English writing of 23 French students with middle or high level of L2 proficiency. He analyzed the statements in their think-aloud protocols from the focus of attention and serving in solving problems. In the experiment, he found that the students paid the most attention to content and language, next was structure. The students with high writing level paid attention to many aspects simultaneously, while the students with low writing level were inclined to pay attention to one aspect. So his conclusion was that L1 writing ability influenced the process and result of
L2 writing and L2 writing ability influenced the writing result more.
Griffin (2004) also studied the influence of attention on the result of L2 writing. The study selected 10 students who were divided into four groups with different L2 levels from low to high. The students were required to write three compositions with different titles and degree of complexity. The result showed that there was no relation between the frequency of attention and L2 proficiency and attention influenced the writing result only on the aspect of grammar. He believed that attention was not the necessary condition to improve
105 L2 writing ability.
The above two research showed different conclusions about the influence of attention on L2 writing, which might come from the following reasons: 1)
L1 writing proficiency wasn’t considered in the research. 2) L2 proficiency wasn’t well controlled in the research. Just as Griffin (2004) explained his conclusion, ‘there maybe no obvious difference in the students’ L2 proficiency, the conclusion would be further tested’. 3) The present study has been defined in paying attention to the language form, seldom covering the other elements reflecting on writing ability such as content, structure and so on. 4) The research on attention hasn’t been deepened into the core part which was consciousness. Robinson (1995:298) has said, “Consciousness is critical to noticing.” When we discussed the role of attention to L2 writing, we should also analyze the conscious degree of attention, which may help to describe the role of attention on L2 writing more clearly.
3.5 Specific research cases on noticing in other aspects of L2 acquisition
Methodologies for studying the role of noticing in L2 acquisition have included both off-line verbal report measures, such as diary entries, questionnaire responses, and immediate and delayed retrospection, and on-line measures such as protocols. The off-line verbal report measures are described as follows:
3.5.1 Diary entries
Schmidt (Schmidt and Frota, 1986) found that diary entries describing
106 aspects of L2 input that he noticed in the input corresponded strongly with the subsequent appearance of these features in his production during interaction with a native speaker in planned, monthly conversations.
3.5.2 Questionnaire responses
Robinson (1996) found that written questionnaire responses asking participants exposed to L2 input in an immediately prior experiment if they had searched for rules, and could say what the rules were, correlated positively and significantly with learning in an implicit learning condition, and that ability to verbalize rules correlated positively and significantly with learning in a condition where participants were instructed correlations of language learning aptitude and awareness suggested that this was a variable ability that could trigger awareness at the levels of noticing, rule search, and verbalization.
3.5.3 Immediate and delayed retrospection
Kim (cited in Robinson, 2001) used immediate off-line retrospective verbal reports to examine the relationship between phonological awareness and
L2 listening comprehension. Finding slow speech rate resulted in greater comprehension than normal speech rate, Kim established a tentative implicational hierarchy of phonological awareness based on verbal reports of those clues in the speech stream learners attended to in arriving at answers to the comprehensive questions: perception of key words > of phrases > of clauses
> of conjoined clauses. Coding learners based on this hierarchy, however, failed to distinguish level of awareness of learners exposed to slow versus normal speech, though there was a trend to higher levels of phonological awareness for
107 those exposed to slow speech, who also demonstrated significantly greater comprehension.
Philip (1998) also used an immediate off-line simulated recall technique in this case to assess whether learners had noticed the relevant properties of orally delivered recasts. Immediately following provision of a recast during dyadic
NS-NNS interaction, the NS prompted recall via a signal. Correct recall and repetition of the recast form were assumed to demonstrate noticing. Philip found that, in general, and particularly for higher-level learners, those who demonstrated greater noticing during the simulated recalls also demonstrated greater gain and development of question forms from pre-to immediated and delayed post-tests.
3.5.4 Summary
In summary, the necessity of noticing is more controversial than the necessity of attention for SLA (Schmidt, 1995, 2001) and is difficult to prove conclusively, given that no measurement instrument or technique can be assumed to be entirely coextensive with, and sensitive to, the contents of noticing. Nonetheless, cumulative findings from the studies reported above are predominantly in line with Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis. Furthermore, many have argued that, even if it is not necessary, noticing certainly contributes to learning and retention, and that consequently consciousness raising (Rutherford,
1987), input enhancement (Sharwood-Smith, 1991), processing instruction
(Van Patten, 1996), or focus on form (Long and Robinson, 1998), which aim to induce it, are likely to be beneficial to learners.
108 3.6 Chapter summary
This chapter reviews the study of L2 writing in relation to L1 writing theories and studies, and documents the few studies directly to explore noticing in L2 writing. First, three influential cognitive models of writing are presented and commented. Next, empirical studies of L2 writing are discussed in terms of some influencing factors, including L1 writing expertise and L2 proficiency.
And a specific review of L2 writing study in the Chinese EFL context is provided. Third, study of noticing in L1 and L2 writings are introduced, including Swain’s Output Hypothesis, the psychological mechanism of noticing in L1 writing and the role of noticing in L2 writing. Finally, specific research cases on noticing in L2 writing and in some other aspects of L2 acquisition are demonstrated under the influence of Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis. A general conclusion of the studies discussed in this chapter is that even though there have been yielded judicious outcomes in contributing to a better understanding of the nature of writing and the specificity of L2 writing, particularly English writing of the EFL learners, important questions as to how the writer’s writing process is understood from a psycho-cognitive aspect, such as the process of noticing which is explained differently in Chapter Two, remain largely unanswered. Investigations on this aspect will surely help achieving better knowledge of what the nature of L2 writing, especially of noticing in L2 writing, is. Therefore, with this research purpose in the present study, the next two chapters—Chapter Four and Chapter Five—will put forward a working framework to proclaim the noticing process in L2 writing in detail.
109 Chapter 4 Research Design and Data analysis
4.1 Research design
4.1.1 Hypothesis
In this study, the aspects of language that EFL learners may notice by comparing their revising abilities between L1 and L2 writing processes has been discussed. The aspects of language are classified into three categories
(Meaning, Discourse, Form), and the different noticing patterns in each category have been described in this study.
4.1.2 Participants
The participants in this study include twenty Japanese university students and twenty Chinese university students.
Twenty Japanese university students come from B2 to M1, whose majors are related to Applied Linguistics. All the participants have studied English for more than six years in the junior and senior high school in Japan. They are believed to have the same L1 proficiency while their English proficiency (L2 proficiency) can be evaluated in the score of Versant. Their versant scores ranged from 50 to 27 and are divided into four levels in order to analyze the data conveniently as follows:
Table 1 L2 Proficiency of the Participants (Japanese)
L2 Level Versant Score Number A 40 or above 3,7,9,13,15,18,20 B Between 39 and 35 1,8,11,12,16,17 C Between 34 and 30 2,5,6,14,19 D Below 29 4,10
110 The other participants in this study are twenty Chinese senior university students, whose majors are related to Economy and Management. All the participants have studied English for more than six years in the junior and senior high school in China. They are believed to have the same L1 proficiency while their English proficiency (L2 proficiency) can be evaluated in the score of CET 4 (College English Test) which is a common English proficiency test in
Chinese universities. Their CET scores ranged from 384 to 519 and are divided into four levels in order to analyze the data conveniently as follows:
Table 2 L2 Proficiency of the Participants ( Chinese)
L2 Level CET 4 Score Number A 500 or above 16,18 B Between 425 and 499 3,4,5,7,9,10,12,13,14 C Between 400 and 424 2,8,19,20 D Below 399 1,6,11,15,17
Note: 500 is a deadline to enter oral test. 425 is a deadline to enter CET 6.
4.1.3 Instrument
The writing stage includes two writing tasks: Japanese/Chinese and
English compositions. The tasks are employed from IELTS test and daily exercises.
Japanese tasks:
Task1:大学に進学することが、若者にとって明るい未来への最善の
道だと考える人がいます。他方、若者はできるだけ早く学校を出て、社
会経験を積んだ方がいいと考える人も少なくありません。この二つの考
え方についてどう思うか、自分の意見を述べてください。タイトルは自
由です。字数:３００字。作成時間:２０分。訂正時間:１０分。
111 (Translation: Some people believe that going to the university is a good preparation for young people’s future career. Other people think that the young should leave school as soon as possible to have some working experience in order to develop their future career better. Please write an article to express your opinion on the two views. The title can be decided by yourself. Writing length: around 300 characters. Writing time: 20 minutes. Revising time: 10 minutes.)
Task2: Recently, it is possible to go shopping, work and communicate via the Internet without face-to-face contact with one another. To what extent do you think this is a positive or negative development?
Please write an article to express your opinion. The title can be decided by yourself. Writing length: around 200 words. Writing time: 30 minutes. Revising time: 15 minutes.
Chinese tasks:
Task 1: 有人认为，上大学是年轻人未来事业发展的最好准备方法。也
有些人认为年轻人应该尽早离开学校，积累工作经验，从而更好的发展事
业。请写一篇文章评论这两种观点，并提出你的看法，题目自定。字数：
300 字。写作时间：20 分钟。修改时间：10 分钟。
(Translation: Some people believe that going to the university is a good preparation for the young people’s future career. Other people think that the young should leave school as soon as possible to have some working experience in order to develop their future career better. Please write an article to express your opinion on the two views. The title can be decided
112 by yourself. Writing length: around 300 characters. Writing time: 20 minutes. Revising time: 10 minutes.)
Task2: Recently, it is possible to go shopping, work and communicate via the Internet without face-to-face contact with one another. To what extent do you think this is a positive or negative development?
Please write an article to express your opinion. The title can be decided by yourself. Writing length: around 200 words. Writing time: 30 minutes. Revising time: 15 minutes.
Both the writing prompts were argumentative and asked for the participants’ opinion and reasoning on the topics. The argumentative tasks were chosen in the hope that it would lead participants to adopt a more knowledge-transforming approach (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1987) and lead to more problem-solving behavior on their part. “With this expected problem-solving behavior, their cognitive activity would be in focal attention and, thus, more available for verbal report” (Roca, de, Larios et, a1., 2008, p.35). Therefore, it was expected that in this kind of task, more useful and informative protocols were likely to be obtained. Besides, the logic of argumentation is one of the most conspicuous characteristics of academic writing (Atkinson and Ramanathan, 1995; Grabe and Kaplan, 1996).
As Cumming (1988, 1989) stated that an argumentative writing task represents the kind of writing conventionally required of students in composition tests and courses. Most influential tests for EFL learners (such as
TOFEL and IELTS) involve writing argumentative essays. The same goes for
113 China, where all the nation-wide English tests at tertiary level (e.g. TEM
Band-4 and Band-8 for English majors, CET Band-4 and Band-6 for English non-majors) include argumentative writing. The same also goes for Japan where all the nation-wide English tests at tertiary level (e.g. Versant Test) include argumentative writing.
These two writing prompts give specific audience for the participants to write for. It is done in consideration of the students’ natural assumption that they write just for their teachers to read and examine. By pointing out concrete readers, the researcher expected that they would experience a more natural and practical reasoning and consider the specific audience in their writing. The time limit is set to twenty minutes for each striking task, even though the researcher tells each participant not to care about the time. This is ample time for the students to finish the think-aloud writing task. The superficial difference of word limit in English and Japanese/Chinese writing would not reveal the significant difference, as it seems to be meaningless to compare the writings in two languages by merely counting the numbers of words or characters (W.
Wang, 2004). For example, the same meaning may be expressed by one
English word or by two or three Japanese/Chinese characters or vise versa.
Comparing this: the English word “student” may be expressed by two characters in Japanese “gaku”+“seyi” and two characters in Chinese
“xue”+“sheng”. Therefore, the word limit set by the two writing prompts is based on the baseline requirements for college students in Japanese/Chinese and English writing. With regards to all these, the prompts are matched across
114 languages as far as possible. Therefore, it is assumed that the topics in
Japanese/Chinese and English had hardly affected the students’ writing performance.
4.1.4 Data collection procedure
The data collection procedure consists of two stages: writing and revising. First, each participant is required to write an L1 composition and an L2 composition separately with the given topics in the fixed time.
During writing, the participant should speak out (think-aloud) what he/she writes, which is recorded by a recording device. Then he/she is given some time to make self-revision on his/her compositions and should talk about the reasons of revision, which is recorded by the recording device. After self-revision, a teacher revises his/her compositions, and speaks out the reasons of revision which is also recorded (adviser revision). Finally, the participant rewrites both the L1 and L2 compositions.
In the data collection procedure, think-aloud is used to collect the audio protocols which come from the participants’ psychological activities.
Think-aloud has been used by some researchers in the study of writing for several times. For example, Leow (1997) analyzed the L2 initial learners’ think-aloud process of problem-solving in combining words, and divided consciousness into three levels: the lowest level is being aware, the next is a problem of being aware, the highest level is some form of meta-linguistic description of being aware. The latter two belong to the meta-cognition.
Leow divided attention from the aspects of attention and the degree of
115 consciousness. Attention was divided into three aspects: (1) Content: the thoughts the writer wants to express; (2) Structure: paragraphs, examples and so on; (3) Language: choosing words, grammar, spelling, punctuation and so on.
Degree of consciousness was also divided into three aspects: Degree One: expressing the aspects of attention with language; Degree Two: instructing a certain aspect with some language/meta language; Degree Three: instructing, explaining, evaluating the attended aspects and some meta-cognitive policies with language.
4.1.5 Evaluating standard
Till now, most of the studies on the role of attention are related to L2 acquisition, among which the focus has been put exclusively on morphology and syntax, with only few studies dealing with lexical learning (Ellis, N. 1994) and pragmatic development, which investigates the writer’s attentional process in L2 writing. In part, this lack of research is due to the difficulty of operationalizing attention into the context of writing. Even in the SLA field, the coding of attention also poses challenges for researchers (Mackey, 2006; Philp,
2003). The few related studies in L2 writing put emphasis on the writer’s attention to linguistic aspects (Swain and Lapkin, 1995, 1998, 2002; Qi and
Lapkin, 2001; Griffin, 2004). However, still few studies (Scardamalia and Paris,
1985; Cumming, 1988, 1989, 1990; Uzawa, 1996) include other major aspects of writing.
In all, Leow’s evaluation of attention is a very practical way to analyze attention, which also can be used for reference to the analysis of noticing.
116 In this study, two different ways are used to illustrate the noticing patterns.
First, the compositions are analyzed from three aspects: Meaning, Discourse and Form. Second, the recorded data is used to reveal the reasons behind different noticing patterns in the writing process psychologically. Besides, the analytical process is divided into two parts: self-revision and adviser revision.
Furthermore, the three evaluating standards (Meaning, Discourse and
Form) are described in Table 3 as follows.
Table 3 Evaluating Standard
4.2 Data analysis
This section reports the results from quantitative analysis of the study. The whole section is composed of two parts. The first part gives a detailed description of the revising data in L1 writing. The second part gives a detailed description of the revising data in L2 writing. As for L1 writing, data from the
117 self-revision drafts of twenty Japanese and twenty Chinese participants are collected and analyzed. As for L2 writing, data from both self-revision’s drafts and adviser revision’s drafts of twenty Japanese and twenty Chinese participants are collected and analyzed. The results, revealing the comparisons of revising data between self-revision and adviser revision, and also between L1 writing and L2 writing, are summarized by a table at the end of this section.
4.2.1 Revising data in L1 writing
4.2.1.1 Revising data in L1 writing from Japanese
We use Table 4 to show the revising data collected from 20 Japanese compositions.
Table 4 Revising Data in L1 Writing (Japanese)
From Table 4 we can see in L1 writing (Japanese):
The number of revision in Meaning covers 71.7% in the whole number of revision (129/180). The number of revision in Discourse covers 5.6% (10/180).
The number of revision in Form covers 22.8% (41/180). In Meaning revision,
118 all the revising work belongs to Mb, during which, Mb1 covers 38% (49/129),
Mb2 covers 62% (80/129). This shows that in L1 writing, self-revision focuses on the content of the composition. Furthermore, in Meaning, self-revision is centered on Mb (b1 According to the recording data of adviser revision, only Ma is noticed by the evaluator. Several concrete examples are given as follows: 1. Revision of Mb1 1) Original: ...早く学校を出るということは、知り合いの幅が広がりにくくなり、 将来いろんなことをしたくなった時の選択肢が狭まるのではないかと思いま す。 (Participant 9) (Translation: Leaving the school earlier, making few friends will lead to have few choices in the future.) Revision: ...早く学校を出るということは、知り合いの幅が広がりにくくなり、 将来いろんなことをしたくなった時の選択肢が少なくなるのではないかと思 います。 Think-aloud data: “‘少ない’ is a more appropriate word than ‘狭まる’ to express the meaning in this sentence.” 2. Revision of Mb2 2) Original:このように、社会経験には、適切な年齢と、前提となる知識や、物 119 事の考え方が必要不可欠であり.... (Participant 18) (Translation: Appropriate age, presupposed knowledge and the way of thinking are indispensable for the social experience.) Revision：このように、社会経験を効果的に積むには、適切な年齢と、前提 となる知識や、物事の考え方が必要不可欠であり.... Think-aloud data: “‘効果的に積む’ is added to express the meaning clearer”. 3) Original:また、年齢もまだ十分でないので、せっかく身につけようとしても、 あまり身につかないだろうということが予測される。 (Participant 18) (Translation: It is supposed that he/she is too young to grasp some experience he\she wants to grasp.) Revision：また、年齢もまだ十分でないので、あまり身につかないだろうと いうことが予測される。 Think-aloud data: “The expression‘身につける’ has been used twice. It seems a little bit repetitive, so I deleted the first one.” 4) Original:確かに、日本の社会に出て、早く馴染むことも重要でしょう。 (Participant 18) (Translation: It is very important to leave school earlier to know the society more.) Revision：確かに、早く学校を出て、社会の役に立つことも重要でしょう。 Think-aloud data: “More appropriate expressions should be used to show the meaning.” 120 3. Revision of D 5) Original:社会経験を早く積むために早く学校を出ることも社会について知る ことはもちろん可能ですが。社会についての知識があまりに乏しいまま社会に 出ると、その社会や他人に迷惑をかけることも多くなると考えます。 (Participant 11) (Translation: It is good to leave the school earlier and have more social experience. But more confusion about less understanding of the society will happen.) Revision:もちろん、社会経験を早く積むために早く学校を出ることによって も社会について知ることは可能だと言えます。しかし、社会についての知識が あまりに乏しいまま社会に出ると、その社会や他人に迷惑をかけることも多く なると考えます。 (Da) Think-aloud data: “‘ も ち ろ ん ’ and‘ し か し ’can make the sentences more coherent.” 6) Original:大学に進学した方が、友人の幅や先生の幅などの知り合いの幅が広 がり、大学でしか取られないものもあると思います。早く学校を出るというこ とは、知り合いの幅が広がりにくくなり、将来いろんなことをしたくなった時 の選択肢が狭まるのではないかと思います。 (Participant 9) (Translation: Going to the university helps to know more teachers and friends while leaving school earlier and making few friends will lead to have few choices in the future.) Revision:また、大学に進学した方が、友人の幅や先生の幅などの知り合いの 幅が広がるなど、大学でしか取られないものもあると思います。一方、早く学 121 校を出るということは、知り合いの幅が広がりにくくなり、将来いろんなこと をしたくなった時の選択肢が少なくなるのではないかと思います。 (Db) Think-aloud data: “‘ ま た ’ and‘ 一 方 ’ show the contrastive relation between the sentences.” 4. Revision of F 7) Original: 時間をなくし有意義な学びをするためにも、まず社会に出て、経験 するということが必要だと考えます。 (Participant 10) (Translation: In order to study something without wasting time,...) Revision:このように、時間の浪費をなくし有意義に学ぶためにも... (Fb2) Think-aloud data: “Compared with‘有意義な学びをする’, ‘有意義に学ぶ’is a better structure to express the meaning.” We can also show the example of the adviser revision. The evaluator usually gives the following suggestion for the participants to revise their compositions. 8) “This composition should be improved from three aspects: What’s the bright future for the young people? What are the reasons for the bright future from going to the university and going to work respectively? Which way is more appropriate for your own bright future?” (Ma) 122 4.2.1.2 Revising data in L1 writing from Chinese Table 5 Revising Data in L1 Writing (Chinese) From Table 5, we can see in L1 writing (Chinese): The number of revision in Meaning covers 74.6% in the whole number of revision (106 /142). The number of revision in Discourse covers 4.2% (6/142). The number of revision in Form covers 21.1% (30/142). In Meaning revision, all the revising work belongs to Mb, during which, Mb1 covers 55.7 % (59/106), Mb2 covers 44.3% (47/106). This shows that in L1 writing, self-revision focuses on the content of the composition. Furthermore, in Meaning, self-revision is centered on Mb (b1>b2) which is totally different from the adviser revision. According to the recording data of adviser revision, only Ma is noticed by the evaluator. Several concrete examples are given as follows: 123 1. Revision of Mb1 9) Original: ... 众所周知，我国社会经济正面临积极的时期。 (Participant 12) (Translation: As is known to all, the social economy is in the positive period in our country.) Revision: ...众所周知，现今我国社会经济适逢机遇期。 Think-aloud data: “The sentence should be revised to a better structure with appropriate expression.” 2. Revision of Mb2 10) Original: 这需要分人而言。有些人来说，早日离开学校是更适合自己的。正 如我们众所周知的比尔盖茨，他就是在大学期间辍学，最后创立微软公司，成为 世界首富。 (Participant 1) (Translation: For some people, leaving school earlier is more appropriate. As is known to all, Bill Gates stopped college study, opened Microsoft Company and became the richest man in the world.) Revision：这需要分人而言。有些人来说，早日离开学校更适合自己。众所周 知，比尔盖茨，他就是在大学期间辍学，最后创立微软公司，成为世界首富。 Think-aloud data: “The revised sentence is more concise”. 11) Original: 他们认为，上大学就是为了工作，倒不如趁早进入社会积累工作经 验，以为这样才是事业发展的出路。 (Participant 3) (Translation: They believe going to the university is for work. Going to the society to gain working experience as early as possible is a good way for the career.) 124 Revision: 他们认为，上大学就是为了工作，与其浪费四年青春，倒不如趁早进 入社会积累工作经验，以为这样才是事业发展的出路。 Think-aloud data: “The sentence is complemented to a whole structure and the meaning is clearer.” 3. Revision of D 12) Original: 上大学不仅仅是学习理论知识，更重要的是跟着老师慢慢学习一种 思想。因为思想认识水平决定一个人的最终命运。因此，上大学就是应该努力获 得不一样的启发，认清国际国内的发展趋势，形成大局观的思想。 (Participant 12) (Translation: Going to the university is not only to study the theoretical knowledge, but also to learn the way of thinking from the teachers. The way of thinking determines people’s final destiny. So going to the university should try to acquire the different enlightenment, realize the developing trend domestically and internationally, and form the thought of open view.) Revision: 上大学不仅仅是学习理论知识，更重要的是跟着老师慢慢学习一种思 想。而这种思想认识能改变一个人的终生命运。因此，上大学就是应该努力获得 不一样的启发，认清国际国内的发展形势，形成大局观的思想。 (Db) Think-aloud data: “而这种 is used more coherent and logical.” 4. Revision of F 13) Original: 我认为这是一种中国人锢有的思想...... (Participant 4) (Translation: I think it is the basic thought of Chinese.) Revision: 我认为这是一种中国人固有的思想...... (Fa1) 125 Think-aloud data: “wrong spelling” 14) Original: ...依我所见，青年人上大学很有必要。这对于青少年的心理健康 增长知识和开阔眼界有着巨大的促进作用。 (Participant 2) (Translation: For me, going to the university is very necessary. It plays an important part in improving the psychological health of youth, increasing the knowledge and opening the horizon.) Revision: ...依我所见，青年人上大学很有必要。这对于青少年的心理健康、知 识的增长和眼界的开阔有着巨大的促进作用。 (Fb1) Think-aloud data: “Three parallel noun structures are better structures of the sentence.” We can also show the example of the adviser revision. The evaluator usually gives the following suggestion for the participants to revise their compositions. 15) “This composition should be given some examples to make deeper argumentation.” (Ma) 4.2.1.3 Summary From the above, Table 4 and Table 5 can be summarized by Table 6. 126 Table 6 Revising Data in Self-revision Note: Mb1refers to words and phrases. Mb2 refers to sentences. Meanwhile, the comparison of revising data in self-revision between Japanese and Chinese can be summarized by Table 7. Table 7 Data Comparison between Japanese and Chinese Japanese Mb 2 (62%) No difference Chinese (Self-revision: Mb; Adviser revision: Ma) Mb 1 (55.7%) Note: Ma refers to content and structure. Mb refers to appropriate words and sentences. Mb1 refers to words and phrases. Mb2 refers to sentences. Combining Table 4 and Table 5, the conclusion can be made that all the participants in both Japanese and Chinese have the self-revising work of their L1 writing although they already have a high level of L1 proficiency which shows noticing is an indispensable psychological process in L1 writing. When the participants make self-revision, they usually notice the use of appropriate words and sentences and some cohesive forms to make their compositions as natural and coherent as possible. However, sentence revision in L1 writing in Japanese is noticed more than word revision while word revision in L1 writing in Chinese is noticed more than sentence revision. Besides, as for the adviser revision, both the teachers in Japanese and Chinese give some suggestions about Meaning including enlarging the scope of content, improving the interest 127 of the composition, etc, which reveals that in the adviser’s eyes, new ideas as well as rich and logical argumentation should be noticed most in L1 writing. 4.2.2 Revising data in L2 writing 4.2.2.1 Revising data in L2 writing from Japanese In L2 writing, the revising data should be divided into self-revision and adviser revision. We use two tables to show the revising data collected from 20 compositions. Table 8 shows the revising data in the self-revision. Table 9 shows the revising data in the adviser revision. Table 8 Revising Data in the Self-revision Table 9 Revising Data in the Adviser Revision 128 From Table 8 and Table 9, we can see several regular patterns. First, the total number of self-revision (155) is more than that of adviser revision (130) in the compositions. Second, self-revision in Meaning covers 54.2% (84/155). Adviser revision in Meaning covers 46.9% (61/130), and adviser revision in Form covers 48.5% (63/130). This shows that self-revision is still centered on Meaning like L1 writing. However, adviser revision focuses almost the same on Meaning and Form. Third, for Meaning, self-revision throws almost all the energy into Mb (63, 64), while adviser revision pays much attention to Ma (23, 61). Last, for Form, both self-revision and adviser revision focus on Fa3 (16, 24) and Fb1 (24, 22). This shows that since the participants have already learned English for several years, their L2 proficiency has reached a relatively high level to support each of them to finish a short English composition. So they have enough confidence to notice more Meaning than Form. However, the evaluator still cares about Form and is used to noticing both Meaning and Form since it is L2 writing. Several concrete examples are given as follows: 1. Self-revision: A. Revision of Mb 16) Original: I see the Internet is very convenient for our lives because it can convey information faster than other media. (Participant15, Level A) Revision: I see the Internet is very convenient for our lives because it can convey 129 information faster than the letter or seeing personally. (Mb1) Think-aloud data: “Other media covers a large scope which includes telephones, letters and so on. Here I just want to express the letter and some other communicative ways which are slower than the quick conveying information.” B. Revision of D Several students have made some simple revision of discourse on arranging the sequence or making examples. 17) Original: First, it can communicate with people all over the word. ...If you are sick, you should not go shopping, but you can buy food, medicine and things you need by Internet. (Participant 5, Level C) Revision: First, it can communicate with people all over the word. Second, if you are sick, you should not go shopping, but you can buy food, medicine and things you need by Internet. (Da) Think-aloud data: “These two sentences are parallel, so ‘second’ should be added before the latter sentence.” 18) Original: I like face-to-face contact with one another. I like talking with my friend. If talking via the Internet, I feel a little sad… (Participant 8, Level B) Revision: I like face-to-face contact with one another. For example, I like talking with my friend. If talking via the Internet, I feel a little sad... (Da) Think-aloud data: “From the second sentence, a concrete example is made to explain the first sentence. So ‘for example’ should be added before the second sentence 130 to make the sentences coherent.” C. Revision of F 19) Original: Of course sometimes trouble occurs when we use Internet, but we can learn how to use Internet polite or right way. (Participant 18, Level A) Revision: Of course sometimes trouble occurs when we use Internet, but we can learn how to use the Internet in a polite or a right way. (Fb1) Think-aloud data: “There is a mistake, the correct form should be ‘in a polite or right way’”. 20) Original: And, Internet enable me shopping easy. (Participant 19, Level C) Revision: And, Internet enables you to shop easily. (Fa3) Think-aloud data: “‘Me’ should be replaced by ‘you’ since ‘you’ is a common pronoun in the composition. ‘Enable’ should be followed by ‘to do’, so ‘shopping’ is replaced by ‘to shop’. ‘Easy’ is replaced by ‘easily’ to modify the verb ‘enable’.” 21) Original: But to develop our life style with using the Internet is so important in the future. (Participant 3, Level A) Revision: But it is more important to develop our life style with using the Internet in the future. (Mb2) Think-aloud data: “According to the English structure, a long subject should be replaced by a ‘it-structure’ which is put at the beginning of the sentence.” 131 2. Adviser revision: Adviser revision focuses on Meaning and Form. A. Revision of Ma 22) Think-aloud data: “Try to use some complex sentences to make the composition have various sentences.” (Participant 3, Level A) 23) Think-aloud data: “At the beginning of the composition, a topic sentence should be shown to express your main idea. The whole structure is not very clear, so you should use some conjunctions to show a clear structure. You can also improve your conclusive sentence to make a better conclusion of the whole composition.” (Participant 6, Level C) B. Revision of Mb 24) Original: However, using the Internet, we can go to the shop and buy a goods anytime. And, the Internet made it impossible for people whose part of body was not good to work easily. (Participant 11, Level B) Revision: However, using the Internet, we can do shopping and buy goods anytime. And also, the Internet made it possible for the disabled people to work easily. (Mb2) 25) Original: When a book isn’t in any bookstore, so you can’t find it anywhere, you use amazon which is Internet shopping site. You can get the book by using it. (Participant 19, Level C) Revision: When you couldn’t find a book in any bookstores, you can use amazon 132 which is an Internet shopping site where you can get the book. (Mb2) C. Revision of D 26) Original: Face-to-face contact is also important. But it is more important in the future. Revision: Although face-to-face contact is necessary, it is more important to develop our life style in the future. (Da) 27) Original: Thanks to the Internet, we can do many things at home, so it’s a positive development. But it has a dangerous aspect. (Participant 14, Level C) Revision: Thanks to the Internet, we can do many things at home, so it’s a positive development. But it also has a dangerous aspect. (Da) Adviser revision also has much revision on Form. 28) Original: Nothing the Internet, we can’t communicate with people easily. Adviser revision also has much revisAdvi (Participant 2, Level C) Revision: Without the Internet, we can’t communicate with people easily. (Fa3) 133 4.2.2.2 Revising data in L2 writing from Chinese Table 10 Revising Data in the Self-revision Table 11 Revising Data in the Adviser Revision From Table 10 and Table 11, we can see several regular patterns. First, the total number of self-revision (150) is more than that of adviser revision (101) in the compositions. Second, self-revision in Meaning covers 45.3% (68/150). Adviser revision in Meaning covers 43.7% (44/101), and adviser revision in Form covers 50.5% (51/101). This shows that both self-revision and adviser 134 revision focus on Form a little bit more than on Meaning which is different from L1 writing. Third, for Meaning, self-revision throws almost all the energy into Mb (68, 0), while adviser revision pays much attention to Ma (16, 28). Last, for Form, both self-revision and adviser revision focus on Fa3 (35, 19) and Fb1 (26, 15). Several concrete examples are given as follows: 1. Self-revision: A. Revision of Mb 29) Original: Now, more and more people prefer to work and communicate via the Internet... (Participant 2, Level C) Revision: Now, more and more people tend to work and communicate via the Internet... (Mb1) Think-aloud data: “‘Tend to’ is a better expression than ‘prefer to’.” 30) Original: With the development of the times, Internet has become a very common thing. (Participant 5, Level B) Revision: With the development of the technology, Internet has become more and more popular. (Mb1) Think-aloud data: “The sentence should be changed to a better expression and structure.” 135 B. Revision of D Several students have made some simple revision of Discourse on arranging the sequence or making examples. 31) Original: I find a bad phenomenon among a small number of older students, that is when they stay at home, mainly play games. Some secondary school students often play games all night... (Participant 5, Level B) Revision: I find a bad phenomenon among a small number of older students, that is when they stay at home, mainly play games. What’s worse, some secondary school students often play games all night... (Da) Think-aloud data: “The sentence becomes more logical and coherent.” C. Revision of F 32) Original: Actually, it is a morning call in the spotlights and aroused widely concern at any inch in the spotlights and aroused widely concern at any inch of social space. (Participant 1, Level D) Revision: Actually, it is a morning call to send us a message that the topic concerning ‘Internet’ has been in the spotlight and arouses wide concern at any inch of social space. (Fa3) Think-aloud data: “An adjective ‘wide’ should be used here to modify the verb ‘concern’.” 33) Original: As far as I’m concered, I like shopping. (Participant 11, Level D) Revision: As far as I’m concerned, I like shopping. (Fa1) 136 Think-aloud data: “Wrong spelling should be revised.” 2. Adviser revision: Adviser revision focuses on Meaning and Form. A. Revision of Ma 34) Think-aloud data: “Try to use some complex sentences to make the composition have various sentences.” (Participant 4, Level B) 35) Think-aloud data: “At the beginning of the composition, a topic sentence should be shown to express your main idea. The whole structure is not very clear, so you should use some conjunctions to show a clear structure. You can also improve your conclusive sentence to make a better conclusion of the whole composition.” (Participant 12, Level B) B. Revision of Mb 36) Original: On the other hand, the Internet can facilitate the people. (Participant 5, Level C) Revision: On the other hand, the Internet can make people’s life more convenient. (Mb1) 37) Original: As far as I’m concerned, I like shopping. (Participant 11, Level D) Revision: As far as I’m concerned, although there are some disadvantages, I like online shopping. (Mb2) 137 C. Revision of D 38) Original: For example, shopping on the Internet can save students a great deal of time on the way between home and store, so they could be able to concentrate more time and energy on their academic work. The internet has shorten the distance between manufactures and consumers... (Participant 6, Level D) Revision: The internet can save students a great deal of time on the way between home and store, so they could be able to concentrate more time and energy on their academic work. Furthermore, the Internet has shorten the distance between manufactures and consumers ... (Da) Adviser revision also has much revision on Form. 39) Original: What we should do is further develop it and exert proper supervision. (Participant 17, Level D) Revision: What we should do is to further develop it and exert proper supervision. (Fa3) 4.2.2.3 Summary From this part, Table 8, Table 9 and Table 10, Table 11 can be summarized by the following Table 12. 138 Table 12 Revising Data in L2 Writing L2 Revision Meaning Form Self-revision 54.2% 41.3% Japanese Mb1: 72.6% Fa3: 25%,Fb1: 37.5% Adviser revision 46.9% 48.5% Ma:37.7%,Mb:37.7% Fa3: 38.1%,Fb1: 34.9% Self-revision 45.3% 52.7% Chinese Mb1: 69.1% Fa3: 44.3%,Fb1: 32.9% Adviser revision 43.7% 50.5% Ma: 36.4%,Mb1: 45.5% Fa3: 37.3%,Fb1: 29.4% Note: Fa3 refers to morphology. Fb1 refers to syntax. Through the comparative analysis between Table 8, Table 9 and Table 10, Table 11, we can reveal the different noticing patterns between L1 and L2 writing in the two languages with the following table. Table 13 Comparison between Japanese and Chinese In Japanese, self-revision is still centered on Meaning like L1 writing. However, adviser revision focuses almost the same on Meaning and Form. For Meaning, self-revision throws almost all the energy into Mb, while adviser revision pays much attention to Ma. For Language, both self-revision and adviser revision focus on Fa3 and Fb1. In L1 writing, although both the self-revision and adviser revision focus on Meaning, they demonstrate the different aspects. For the self-revision, the writers like to notice the sentence processing most while for the adviser revision, the adviser only notices the idea, 139 the whole content, and the process of argumentation. In L2 writing writers notice the words processing most when they make self-revision. However, for the adviser revision, the adviser notices both the sentence and word processing in the revising process of Form. Besides, he/she also notices the idea, the whole content, and the process of argumentation in the revising process of Meaning like that in L1 writing. In Chinese, both self-revision and adviser revision focus on Form a little bit more than on Meaning which is different from L1 writing. For Meaning, self-revision throws almost all the energy into Mb, while adviser revision pays much attention to Ma. Last, for Language, both self-revision and adviser revision focus on Fa3 and Fb1. In L1 writing, For Meaning, in the self-revision, the writers like to notice the word processing most while for the adviser revision, the adviser only notices the idea, the whole content and the process of argumentation. In L2 writing writers in both self-revision and adviser revision notice Form most. 4.3 Data supplement Since there were not enough participants taking part in the experiment, in order to testify the analytical result of the experiment further, we choose another eighteen participants to do the experiment again in the next year. This time, nine undergraduate students in Japan and nine graduate students in China are included in the experiment. 140 4.3.1 Participants Nine Japanese students come from B3 and B4, whose majors are related to Applied Linguistics. Their Versant scores ranged from 57 to 28 and are divided into four levels in order to analyze the data conveniently as follows: Table 14 L2 Proficiency of the Participants (Japanese) L2 Level Versant Score Number A 40 or above 6,7,9 B Between 39 and 35 1,2,3,4,8, C Between 34 and 30 0 D Below 29 5 The other nine participants are Chinese graduate students, whose majors are related to Civil Engineering. Their English proficiency (L2 proficiency) can be evaluated in the score of CET 4 (College English Test) which is a common English proficiency test in Chinese universities. Their CET scores ranged from 406 to 581 and are divided into 4 levels in order to analyze the data conveniently as follows: Table 15 L2 Proficiency of the Participants (Chinese) 4.3.2 Analysis 4.3.2.1 Revising data in L1 writing 4.3.2.1.1 Revising data in L1 writing from Japanese 141 Table 16 L1 writing in Japanese From Table 16, we can see in L1 writing (Japanese): The number of revision in Meaning covers 70.7% in the whole number of revision (70/99). The number of revision in Discourse covers 4% (4/99). The number of revision in Form covers 25.3% (25/99). In Meaning revision, most of the revising work belongs to Mb, during which, Mb1 covers 57.1% (40/70), Mb2 covers 41.4% (29/70). This shows that in L1 writing, self-revision focuses on the content of the composition. Furthermore, in Meaning, self-revision is centered on Mb (b1>b2) which is much different from the adviser revision. According to the recording of adviser revision, Ma is much more focused (20,23). Several concrete examples are given as follows: 40) Original: 大学に進学することが、若者にとって、明るい未来への道のひと つだとは思うが、最善とは言えないと思う。 (Participant 3) (Translation: Going to the university is a good way for the young people to have 142 bright future. However, it is not the best way.) Revision: 勉強をすることによって、未来の可能性の幅が広がるため、大学 に進学することは、若者にとって、明るい未来への道のひとつであるが、最善 とは言えないと思う。 (Mb2, Fa3) Think-aloud data: “The adding part, which shows the reason, makes the whole sentence more complete and fluent. ‘である’shows the affirmative tone of the fact.” 41) Original: 早い段階で就職し、経験を積んだ後に改めて大学へ進学する道が 提供、あるいはサポートされて良いのではないかと思います。(Participant 7) (Translation: The ways, supporting those who got their jobs early, gained some experience, and then went to the university, should be supplied.) Revision: 早い段階で就職し、経験を積んだ後に改めて大学へ容易に進学で きる道が提供、あるいはサポートされて良いのではないかと思います。(Mb1) Think-aloud data: “‘容易に…できる’ is added to express the clearer meaning.” 4.3.2.1.2 Revising data in L1 writing from Chinese Table 17 Revising Data in L1 Writing (Chinese) 143 From Table 17, we can see in L1 writing (Chinese): The number of revision in Meaning covers 57.1% in the whole number of revision (32/56). The number of revision in Discourse covers 7.1% (4/56). The number of revision in Form covers 35.7% (20/56). In Meaning revision, most of the revising work belongs to Mb, during which, Mb1 covers 71.9% (23/32), Mb2 covers 25% (8/32). This shows that in L1 writing, self-revision focuses on the content of the composition. Furthermore, in Meaning, self-revision is centered on Mb (b1>b2) which is totally different from the adviser revision. According to the recording data of adviser revision, only Ma is mentioned. Several concrete examples are given as follows: 42) Original: 这些在大学中获得的资源可以为我们未来的事业发展提供良好的平 台，但并不一定意味着接受过大学教育的人在未来的事业发展上一定能更好。 (Participant7) (Translation：Although the information acquired in the university can supply good chance, it doesn’t mean that those who have studied in the university can have the better carrier in the future.) Revision：这些在大学中获得的资源可以为我们未来的事业发展提供良好的平 台，但并不一定意味着接受过大学教育的人在未来的事业发展上更具有优势。 (Mb1) Think-aloud data: “Using a better expression.” 43) Adviser revision: “After showing the two different views about the topic, you 144 should give your own view at the end of the composition.” (Ma) (Participant 7) 4.3.2.1.3 Summary From the above, Table 16 and Table 17 can be summarized by Table 18. Table 18 Revising Data in Self-revision Meaning Discourse Form Japanese 70.7% 4% 25.3% Mb1: 57.1%; Mb2: 41.4% Chinese 57.1% 7.1% 35.7% Mb1: 71.9%; Mb2: 25% Note: Mb1refers to words and phrases. Mb2 refers to sentences. From Table 18, we obtain that the analytical result is almost the same as that is shown in Table 6. The only different point lies in that Japanese Mb1 is more than Mb2 in Table 6 while Japanese Mb1 is less than Mb2 in Table 18. This shows that there is no regular revising pattern between Japanese Mb1 and Mb2. 4.3.2.2 Revising data in L2 writing 4.3.2.2.1 Revising data in L2 writing from Japanese Table 19 Revising Data in the Self-revision 145 Table 20 Revising Data in the Adviser Revision From Table 19 and Table 20, we can see several regular patterns. First, the total number of self-revision (76) is more than that of adviser revision (52) in the compositions. Second, self-revision in Meaning covers 56.6% (43/76). Adviser revision in Meaning covers 40.4% (21/52), and adviser revision in Form covers 59.6% (31/52). This shows that self-revision is still centered on Meaning like L1 writing. However, adviser revision focuses on Form. Third, for Meaning, self-revision throws almost all the energy into Mb (40, 43), while adviser revision focuses more on Ma (11, 21). Last, for Form, both self-revision and adviser revision focus on Fa3 (20, 17). The above discussion shows the same analytical result with Table 6 and Table 7. Several concrete examples are given as follows: 44) Original: Internet is useful and makes our life more convenient, but it lacks of important opportunity. (Participant 8) 146 Revision: Internet is useful and makes our life more convenient, but it reduces the important opportunity. (Mb1) Think-aloud data: “The verb ‘reduces’ shows the meaning more exactly.” 45) Adviser revision: “Please write the topic sentence at the beginning or the end of the composition.” (Ma) (Participant 2) 4.3.2.2.2 Revising data in L2 writing from Chinese Table 21 Revising Data in the Self-revision Table 22 Revising Data in the Adviser Revision 147 From Table 21 and Table 22, we can see several regular patterns. First, the total number of self-revision (41) is less than that of adviser revision (98) in the compositions. Second, self-revision in Meaning covers 31.7% (13/41), and self-revision in Form covers 65.9% (27/41). Adviser revision in Meaning covers 25.5% (25/98), and adviser revision in Form covers 71.4% (70/98). This shows that both self-revision and adviser revision focus on Form more than on Meaning which is different from L1 writing. Third, for Meaning, self-revision throws almost all the energy into Mb (11, 13), while adviser revision pays much attention to Ma (7, 25). Last, for Form, self-revision focuses on Fa3 (16), adviser revision focuses on Fa2 (24) and Fa3 (21). This discussion also shows the same analytical result with Table 8 and Table 9. Several concrete examples are given as follows: 46) Revision: Adding a sentence “…People hold different views on this issue….” (Ma) (Participant 8) Think-aloud data: “Adding the sentence makes a more natural transition.” 47) Original: Although it has convenience to our life, it also brings a lot of problems, look straight to the electronic products for a long time is easy to make our vision loss. (Participant 6) Revision: Although it has convenience to our life, it also brings a lot of problems, staring at the electronic products for a long time is harm to our sightseeing. (Mb1) Think-aloud data: “‘staring at’ is a more appropriate expression. ‘make our vision 148 loss’ is a wrong expression which should be revised as ‘harm to our sightseeing’”. 4.3.2.2.3 Summary From this part, Table 19, Table 20 and Table 21, Table 22 can be summarized by the following Table 23. Table 23 Revising Data in L2 Writing Through the comparative analysis between Table 19, Table 20 and Table 21, Table 22, we can reveal the different noticing patterns between L1 and L2 writing in the two languages with the following table. Table 24 Comparison between Japanese and Chinese In Japanese, self-revision in L2 writing is still centered on Meaning like L1 writing. However, adviser revision focuses on Form. For Meaning, self-revision throws almost all the energy into Mb, while adviser revision pays 149 much attention to Ma. For Form, adviser revision focuses on Fa3. In L1 writing, although both the self-revision and adviser revision focus on Meaning, they demonstrate the different aspects. For the self-revision, the writers like to notice the word and sentence processing most while for the adviser revision, the adviser notices the idea, the whole content and the process of argumentation more. In L2 writing writers notice the words processing most when they make self-revision. However, for the adviser revision, the adviser notices both the sentence and word processing in the revising process of Form. In Chinese, both self-revision and adviser revision focus on Meaning in L1 writing and Form in L2 writing. For Meaning, self-revision throws almost all the energy into Mb, while adviser revision pays much attention to Ma. Last, for Form, both self-revision and adviser revision focus on Fa3. In L1 writing, for Meaning, in the self-revision, the writers like to notice the word processing most while for the adviser revision, the adviser also notices the idea, the whole content and the process of argumentation. In L2 writing, writers in both self-revision and adviser revision notice Form most. 4.4 Result of data analysis from the two experiments After analyzing the whole data from the two experiments, the result can be summarized as follows: The result of data analysis from the original experiment is demonstrated in Table 25. 150 Table 25 Noticing Patterns between Japanese and Chinese (original experiment) Self-revision Adviser revision L1writing L2writing L1writing L2writing Japanese Mb2 Meaning (Mb1) Ma Meaning Form (Fa3, Fb1) Chinese Mb1 Form (Fa3,Fb1) Ma Form The result of data analysis from the supplementary experiment is demonstrated in Table 26. Table 26 Noticing Patterns between Japanese and Chinese (supplementary experiment) Self-revision Adviser revision L1writing L2 writing L1writing L2writing Japanese Mb1 Meaning (Mb1) Ma, Mb1 Form (Fa3) Chinese Mb1 Form (Fa3) Ma, Mb1 Form (Fa2,Fa3) Examining the data in Table 25 comparing with that in Table 26, the analytical result is almost the same. Only do some different points lie in the small aspects. For example: in Table 25, Japanese self-revision in L1 writing focuses on Mb2. While in Table 26, it changes to Mb1. In Table 25, Form (Fa3, Fb1) in the adviser revision in Japanese L2 writing changes to Form (Fa3) in Table 26. The difference may come from the different participants and the evaluators in the adviser revision between the two experiments. Concerning the same result of the two experiments, the analysis of supplemented data strongly suggests the appropriateness of the original one, testifying the above conclusion we draw in 4.3 more persuasively. Besides, we also analyze the standard deviation of L2 revision in the two 151 experiments and show the result in Table 27. Table 27 Standard Deviation of L2 Revision From From Table 27, we obtain that the standard deviations of Chinese L2 revision are higher than Japanese L2 revision generally. Especially, in the supplementary experiment, the standard deviations of Chinese L2 revision are much higher (0.171, 0.2295) than the other deviations (below 0.1), demonstrating that Chinese L2 writers take much more notice of Form than Meaning, while Japanese L2 writers take notice of Meaning a little more than Form. 4.5 Chapter summary In this chapter, noticing has been explored through the research which is designed by a think-aloud writing experiment. First, twenty Japanese and twenty Chinese university students are selected in the experiment. Through analyzing the experimental data from Meaning, Discourse and Form, we can obtain that in Japanese, self-revision in L2 writing is centered on Meaning like 152 L1 writing while adviser revision focuses on Form. In Chinese, both self-revision and adviser revision focus on Meaning in L1 writing and Form in L2 writing. Then, we select other nine Japanese and nine Chinese university students to do the experiment again, and obtain the same result. From the analysis, we can observe some different phenomena appearing between Japanese and Chinese, which will be further discussed in the next chapter. 153 Chapter 5 Insight into Noticing 5.1 Analysis of noticing in L2 writing In L2 writing, self-revision is an indispensable process which is a key to show the pattern of noticing. In this part, we will discuss this point. Since the supplementary experiment shows the same result with the original experiment, we only use the data in the original experiment to make analysis. As the above mentioned, L2 proficiency of the original forty participants’ has been divided into four levels according to their Versant and CET scores, and the data will be dealt from two aspects: quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. 5.1.1 Quantitative analysis Table 28 Quantity of Revision (Japanese) From Table 28, we can clearly know that with the descending of L2 proficiency, the quantity of revision gradually descends. E. g. Over 80% of participants with Level A have a large quantity of revision. While all the participants with Level D have no quantity of revision. It shows that L2 proficiency is a very important element to influence the degree of noticing in L2 writing. Those who have a higher level of L2 proficiency can notice more than those whose L2 proficiency is relatively low. 154 Table 29 Quantity of Revision (Chinese) Although Table 29 doesn’t show a very clear regularity of quantity of Revision, generally large quantity reduces and small quantity rises, which shows that those who have a relatively higher level of L2 proficiency can notice more than those whose L2 proficiency is relatively low. 5.1.2 Qualitative analysis We use four groups of tables to show the distribution of revision among A, B, C and D respectively. Table 30 Revision of Level A (Japanese) Table 31 Revision of Level A (Chinese) From above two tables, we can see both Japanese and Chinese with Level A notice Meaning more than Form. 155 Table 32 Revision of Level B (Japanese) Noticing happens more on Meaning than Form. Table 33 Revision of Level B (Chinese) Noticing happens almost the same between Meaning and Form. (5/9 Form, 4/9 Meaning) Table 34 Revision of Level C (Japanese) Noticing happens more on Form than Meaning. Table 35 Revision of Level C (Chinese) Noticing happens more on Form than Meaning. 156 Table 36 Revision of Level D (Japanese) Noticing happens more on Form than Meaning. Table 37 Revision of Level D (Chinese) Noticing happens more on Form than Meaning. We can draw Table 38 to summarize all the above tables. Table 38 Quality of Revision Self-revision Adviser revision Meaning Form Meaning Form Level A noticing Japanese Level B noticing noticing noticing Level C noticing Level D noticing Level A noticing noticing Chinese Level B noticing noticing noticing noticing Level C noticing Level D noticing From the above tables, we can see: There are some different points between Japanese and Chinese: In Japanese, with all levels of L2 proficiency, most participants have a larger quantity of revision in Meaning than Form (except B3 in Level B and B4 in Level C), which shows that the participants still like to put the noticing on 157 Meaning in L2 writing and revising process. While in Chinese, the quantity of revision in Form is a little bit more than Meaning. In Japanese, with the descending of L2 proficiency, the proportion of Form revision becomes higher and higher. For Level B and Level C, the quantity of Form revision overcomes Meaning revision. However, for Level D, the lowest L2 proficiency, the quantity of Meaning revision overcomes Form revision again. This phenomenon shows an interesting character of noticing pattern, which is that the participants with the highest and lowest L2 proficiency usually notice Meaning the most while those who have the middle level of L2 proficiency are involved in the unceasing converting noticing between Form and Meaning. During their writing, they have to balance their noticing between Form and Meaning all the time which is an important element for L2 writers to feel the difficulty of L2 writing revealed in think-aloud recording protocols. While in Chinese, most participants with level A and Level B notice the same between Meaning and Form, with Level C and Level D, they take more noticing of Form than Meaning. However, for the adviser revision, situation is the same. The adviser usually has the same quantity of revision between Meaning and Form. In Table 5, the revision number of Meaning is 61, the revision number of Form is 63. It shows that when evaluating the L2 compositions, the evaluator still puts much noticing on the language revision which is considered as an important evaluating standard in L2 writing. 158 5.2 Aspects of noticing in L1 and L2 writings Through the comparison between L1 and L2 revising processes, we can get the following conclusions. For the self-revision, the Japanese students’ noticing to Meaning ranks the first in both L1 and L2 writings. This study reveals that the participants comment Meaning the most frequently in both L1 and L2 writings but focus on different aspects. In L1 writing, self-revision focuses on the sentences. In L2 writing, self-revision focuses on the words. That is to say, the participants notice more on the sentence processing in L1 writing, while they notice more on the word processing in L2 writing. In contrast, the Chinese students notice Meaning first in L1 writing and notice the same between Meaning and Form in L2 writing. For the adviser revision, both the Japanese and Chinese evaluators give some general suggestions about Meaning without any comment on the use of Form which means that in L1 writing, only Meaning is the key point to be noticed by the adviser. In L2 writing, the evaluator notices not only the sentence and word processing in the revising process of Form but also the idea, the whole structure and the process of argumentation in the revising process of Meaning like that in L1 writing. In L2 writing process, L2 proficiency affects the Japanese L2 writers’ noticing to Meaning, Discourse and Form. The participants with lower L2 proficiency put much noticing on Meaning. As their L2 proficiency moves up, L2 writers notice both Meaning and Form more and more up to the same 159 degree. Then, if their L2 proficiency reached relatively high, they would notice Meaning most again. However, for the Chinese L2 writers, most of them are used to notice the same between Meaning and Form. Only Level D notices more on Meaning. Through the analysis of L2 revising data, we can get the following conclusions. For the Japanese, most participants have a large quantity of revision with relatively high L2 proficiency which shows that they have realized the importance of revision and tried to notice more about their L2 compositions. The higher L2 proficiency, the higher revision proportion, which means that L2 proficiency is a very important element to improve the ability of noticing. With all levels of L2 proficiency, most participants have a larger quantity of revision in Meaning than Form (except B3 in Level B and B4 in Level C), which reveals that the participants still like to put the noticing on Meaning in the L2 writing and revising processes. Interestingly, the noticing pattern presents a curved shape which is that the participants with the highest and lowest L2 proficiency usually notice Meaning the most while those who have the middle level of L2 proficiency are involved in the unceasing converting noticing between Form and Meaning. During their writing, they have to balance their noticing between Form and Meaning all the time which is an important element for L2 writers to feel the difficulty of L2 writing. 160 In Chinese, there is no clear regularity of noticing in L2 writing. We can only see two points clearly. Most participants have realized the importance of revision and tried to notice more about their L2 compositions. And the participants with higher level of L2 proficiency notice the same on Meaning and Form. The difference of revision in noticing between Japanese and Chinese may come from the different language grammatical systems. Japanese belongs to a kind of grammatical system with a lot of variations of verbs and adjectives. Therefore, Japanese L2 writers are familiar with, and suitable to the variations of English words, which means that they need not paying much attention to Form and will have enough time to take more notice of Meaning during L2 writing. In contrast, Chinese belongs to a kind of grammatical system without variations of any words/characters. During Chinese L2 writing processes, L2 writers are not familiar with, and suitable to the variations of English words. Naturally, taking notice of Form spend more time, which decreases their time of noticing Meaning. However, this is the author’s personal and general idea, which should be tested further in the future. 5.3 Influence of L2 proficiency on noticing L2 proficiency influences the degree of consciousness in noticing between Form and Meaning. Through the observation on the participants’ writing processes, those who have high level of L2 proficiency also have high ability of 161 automatic cognition. Furthermore, when they find some problems, they can solve the problems with high degree of meta-policy. High level writers write their scripts with relatively fluent language when thinking. While the proportion of automatic writing scripts in low level writers is much lower than high level writers. This result shows that the classic writing theory that writing is a problem-solving process (Flower and Hayes, 1981) couldn’t explain all the phenomenon in the writing process. This study demonstrates that writing is also a process of knowledge restructure and the core isn’t influenced by the language in writing, which has the same result with the research of Rocade Lario and so on (2001). L2 writing is a special area which is closely related but not different from L1 writing, L2 acquisition and L2 teaching. From the aspect of noticing, L2 writing is not only a process of solving the problems but also a process of knowledge reconstruction. It indicates to us that in the writing classes, the students should write as much as possible. Only writing out shows the clear thinking. Besides, helping the students to solve the problem and restructure the language is an important task in the teaching of writing, so the teacher should concern the students’ noticing of Form much. Meanwhile, for the compositions with high level of L2 proficiency, Chinese teachers should notice Meaning as much as possible, which is the same as Japanese teachers do. In a word, this study shows that L2 proficiency influences not only L2 writers’ aspects of noticing but also the evaluator’ s consciousness of noticing in a certain degree. Studying L2 writing from noticing is an attempt. This 162 study is only a case research which is anticipated to be further tested in the future research. 5.4 Neural basis of noticing in the brain In order to grasp noticing more deeply, we need exploring where noticing happens and how noticing works in the brain from the view of neurolinguistics. In this section, we will try to explore noticing’s correspondent neural basis in the brain. 5.4.1 Consciousness and working memory As a large-scale institution with a staff of a hundred billion neurons, the brain must rely on a similar briefing mechanism. The function of consciousness may be to simplify perception by drafting a summary of the current environment before voicing it out loudly, in a coherent manner, to all other areas involved in memory, decision, and action. There have been some descriptions on consciousness. “The improvements we install in our brain when we learn our languages permit us to review, recall, rehearse, redesign our own activities, turning our brains into echo chambers of sorts, in which otherwise evanescent processes can hang around and become objects in their own right. Those that persist the longest, acquiring influence as they persist, we call our conscious thoughts”(Daniel, 1996), “Consciousness is then, as it were, the hyphen which joins what has been to what will be, the bridge which spans the past and the future” (Henri, 1911). There may be a very good reason why our consciousness condenses sensory messages into a 163 synthetic code, devoid of gaps and ambiguities: such a code compact enough to be carried forward in time, entering what we usually call “working memory”. Working memory and consciousness seem to be tightly related. The component of the mind that psychologists call “working memory” is one of the dominant functions of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the areas that it connects with, thus making these areas strong candidates for the depositories of our conscious knowledge. These regions pop up in brain imaging experiments whenever we briefly hold on to a piece of information: a phone number, a color, or the shape of a flashed picture. Prefrontal neurons implement an active memory: long after the picture is gone, they continue to fire throughout the short-term memory task—sometimes as long as dozens of seconds later. And when the prefrontal cortex is impaired or distracted, this memory is lost—it falls into unconscious oblivion. Anyway, the prefrontal cortex seems to play a key role in our ability to maintain information overtime, to reflect upon it, and to integrate it into our unfolding plans. 5.4.2 Noticing in the brain Although noticing happens immediately after consciousness during working memory, noticing is a much more complex processing in the brain, which even happens between two hemispheres. 5.4.2.1 Noticing in cerebrum and cerebellum It is well known that noticing in L1 writing is mainly a semantic processing in the brain while noticing in L2 writing includes both syntactic and semantic processing in the brain. There seems to be much complicated 164 psychological processes of noticing in the brain. According to traditional neurolinguistic studies, language happens and develops in relation with the cerebrum. Some researchers have carried out research on the location of brain function in both the syntactic and the semantic processing through experiments on syntactic and semantic violation, and have achieved some viable results. For example, Ni’s (2000) study discovered that “semantic violation mainly activates the location of BA6, 10, 22, 46 in the brain, while syntactical violation mainly activates the location of BA44, 45, 46 in the brain.” Friederic et al. (2003) stated that “compared with the normal sentences, those sentences violated in syntax activated the middle location of Superior Temporal Gyrus (STG). Syntax process activated the front location of left Superior Temporal Gyrus (STG), some parts of Broca’s area and Base Ganglion.” Newman (2003) significantly found that Pars Triangularis (F3t) was responsible for the sentence subject while Pars Opercularis (F3op) was responsible for the simple syntactical analysis which showed that different places in Broca’s area also corresponded to the different types of syntactical processing. In recent years, some other researchers have done new research on the cerebellum and they did not disclaim the fact that the cerebellum also had a relation with the language processing. They even put forward the concept of “cerebellum of language.” The results of several experiments showed that the activation of the cerebellum was related to the distinction of semantics. The language function 165 of the cerebellum is to support other functional regions. Many studies with functional brain images found that the right hemisphere of the cerebellum was activated in language processing, including fluency, recovery of semantic words and oral working memory tasks. From this research, we can infer that noticing in both L1 and L2 writings can activate language processing in both the cerebrum and the cerebellum. Noticing in L1 writing may only activate the semantic processing while noticing in L2 writing may activate the syntactic processing in the cerebrum first, then the semantic processing in the cerebrum, and lastly the semantic processing in the cerebellum. The study in this field will be examined in detail in the near future. 5.4.2.2 Noticing generation—syntactical processing In recent years, mechanism of syntactical processing has been studied by some researchers in brain function. From the experiment, we obtain that sentence revision in L2 writing ranks most all over the revising work, which means that much noticing in L2 writing happens through the syntactical processing. Generally speaking, single words can be combined to larger syntactic units which are called syntax and also the basis of understanding sentences and writing paragraphs. Syntactic processing has been studied much especially in the Indian-European language. With the development of ERP, PET, fMRI and so on, more and more researchers have tried utilizing these new technologies to explore the brain function of syntactic processing and made new progress. 166 As for the research of brain function, there are some models including declaring/programming double-system model by Ullman (2001, 2004), three-stage theory by Friederici and so on (Friederici, 2002; Friederici and Kotz, 2003), MUC model by Hagoort and so on (Hagoort, 2003, 2005) and double-route model by Hickok (Hickok and Poeppel, 2000, 2004, 2007). These theories or models have both similar and different views on syntactic processing. Declaring/programming double-system model believed that language processing depended on mental lexicon and mental grammar among which mental lexicon based on the declaring memory system where included some phrases or langs except words. However, the choice and application of grammar happened in the system of programming memory, which was a inner and unconscious cognitive progress. Syntax belonged to a part of grammar, which had the function of combining lexis and syntax to a higher level. Even the sentences combined by a series of false words, the readers still could utilize some syntactical information (verbs’ inflectional change, nuon’s single and plural forms, affixes of functional words and adjectives or adverbs) to make a general and abstract structural feature although the concrete syntactical features could not be acquired. This model believed that if the syntactical processing was required by the present task, frontal lobes (especially Broca’s and the neighbor areas), assistant movement and the left basal ganglia would be activated obviously (Ullman, 2001, 2004). A research of Newman and so on found that the brain’s activated 167 model between the violation of syntactic processing and semantics was different: compared with normal sentences, syntactic violating sentences caused stronger activation of basal ganglia, while semantic violation mainly led to the normal activation of basal ganglia (Newman, Pancheva, Ozawa, Neville and Ullman, 2001). Declaring/programming double-system model believed that frontal lobes and the basal ganglia were not special to the language area in the syntactical processing. Other non-language area like the cognitive process related to rule processing was also relevant to the activation in these brains’ areas and the theory also called the related syntactic processing as the processing based on regulations together. Syntax belonged to one of these regulations. Friederici’s three-stage theory (Friederici, 2002; Friederici and Kotz, 2003) was given through the research of both electroencephalogram and brain function image. So the model included not only the time information of sentence processing but also the locating information of brain function. It divided syntactic processing into three stages and every stage had the participation of syntactic processing. In the first stage, word classes (nouns and verbs) were used to set up phrasal structure which was a process of quick automatization and its function was located in the left inferior frontal operculum and the left gyri temporalis superior. Friederici and his operators found that compared with normal sentences, when the normal syntactical structure could not be formed because of the violation of word class in the sentences, the left inferior frontal 168 operculum and the left gyri temporalis superior would be activated additionally (Friederici and Kotz, 2003). In the second stage, inflectional change and other morpho-syntax information as well as semantic information took part in the setup of thematic relation together. This process involved a series of brain areas of the left frontal lobe and lobi temporalis in which BA44/45 in the left gyrus frontalis inferior was relevant to the syntactical processing, while the frontal BA45/47 was related to the semantic processing which also included the left gyri temporalis medium. In the third stage, different kinds of information could be integrated in the back of left lobi temporalis, especially when there were complex sentences or violation of syntax and semantics, syntactical information and semantic information could not be integrated quickly, reanalysis of sentences or repairing process to the mistakes happened in this process which happened in the left gyri temporalis superior, the back of parallel fissure and basal ganglia. MUC Model of Hagoort believed that language processing included three elements: memory, unification and control, among which memory and choosing lexical information including phonetic information, semantic information and grammatical information were responsible by the left frontal lobes (including gyri temporalis superior/ the middle and back parallel fissure, gyri temporalis medium and gyri temporalis inferior), while all kinds of control in the parole included noticing the related information selectively, ignoring non-related information and selecting appropriate expressive ways, such as the 169 bilinguals inhabiting one language and choosing another language to communicate with others, or doing some other activities with communication and so on. These psychological processes could be realized by the noticing controlling net in the frontal lobes and anterior cingutat. This model focused on the stage of information processing integration. With the input of language information, the selected lexical information was gradually used in the information integration while the responsibility for integrating these small units information into larger meaningful units was finished by the left gyrus frontalis inferior. Based on meta-analytical result (Bookheimer, 2002), the researchers divided the left gyrus frontalis inferior into three different functional areas, among which BA44/46 was relevant to phonetic processing, BA44/45 was relevant to syntactic processing, BA45/47 was relevant to semantic processing. The above areas were supported by static functional connecting analysis by Xiang and others (Xiang, Fonteijn, Norris and Hagoort, 2010). Hickok’s double-pathway model divided audio language processing system into Dorsal pathway and Ventral pathway among which dorsal pathway was related to the reflection of sound-motor, while ventral-pathway was related to the reflection of sound-meaning (Hickok and Poeppel, 2007). Hickok observed in many studies that the left lobi temporalis had stronger activation when processing the syntactical materials compared with words’ series and phonetic series without structure (Humphries, Binder, Medler and Liebenthal, 2006; Humphries, Love, Swinney and Hickok, 2005). According to the 170 double-pathway model, this brain area belonged to a part of ventral pathway, responsible for the lexical information extracted from gyri temporalis medium and gyri temporalis inferior being combined to a larger unit symptom. This model also believed that Broca’s area in the ventral pathway only influenced the syntactical processing through phonetic short memory, without participating in the syntactical processing itself since when the examiners were required to finish some phonetic tasks at the same time of syntactical processing, BA44 area’s syntactical complex effect disappeared (Rogalsky, 2008). Some patients’ research also found that the destroy of fasciculus connecting dorsal or ventral pathway in different brain areas could also lead to the difficulty of syntactical processing to some degree. Because of the different views of theories and models raised by different researchers, the explanations of syntactical processing mechanism were also different. Declaring/programming double-system model and double-pathway model generally defined the syntactical processing as a single, homogeneous progress. Friederici’s three-stage model distinguished three different levels of syntactical processing, and regard them as the different brain functions. Double-pathway model believed that Broca’s area did not participate in the syntactical processing itself, frontal lobes inferior was responsible for the syntactical processing. MUC model believed that the function of Broca’s area was to integrate the extracted information into larger information units, while declaring/programming double-system model believed that Broca’s area was responsible for the syntactical regulating information application. Three-stage 171 model believed that Broca’s area was responsible for utilizing the case marks, words’ inflectional change and some other syntactical information to distribute thematic role. About the function of left frontal lobes inferior, three-stage model believed that this area was responsible for utilizing the words’ information to set up phrasal and sentence structure, which is the first step of syntactical processing. While double-pathway model believes that this area is responsible for the process, which is to combine the small semantic units into larger units to acquire the syntactical semantics. 5.4.3 Unconscious Noticing From the theoretical basis of this essay, noticing comes after consciousness. However, there are also unconscious noticing happening in the brain2. It has been long thought that the central executive which controls our mental operations, avoids automatic responses, switches tasks, and detects errors, is the sole province of the conscious mind. But recently, sophisticated executive functions have been shown to operate unconsciously, based on invisible stimuli. One such function is the ability to control ourselves and inhibit our automatic responses. Imagine performing a repetitive task, such as pressing a key whenever a picture appears on the screen—except that on rare occasions, the picture depicts a black disk, and then you absolutely have to refrain from clicking. This is called the “stop signal” task, and much research shows that the ability to inhibit a routine response is a marker of the mind’s central executive 2 I was indebted for Professor Ikari’s suggestions on this view. (personal communication, 2016, Osaka) 172 system. The Dutch psychologist Simon van Gaal asked whether refraining from responding required consciousness and the answer was yes. When an unconscious “stop” signal was briefly flashed, the participants’ hands slowed down, and occasionally, they stopped responding altogether. They did so without understanding why, because the stimulus that triggered this inhibition remained unseen. These findings indicate that invisible is not synonymous with out of control. Even an invisible stop signal can trigger a wave of activity that spreads deep into the executive networks that allow us to control our actions. Similarly, we can detect some of our errors without being conscious. In an eye movement task, when the participants’ eyes deviate from the plan, the error triggers an activation of the executive control centers in the anterior cingulate cortex—even when participants are unaware of the error and deny that their eyes wandered off the target. Unconscious signals can even cause a partial switch to another task. When subjects are shown a conscious cue that tells them to change from task one to task two, flashing this cue below the threshold for awareness still has the effect of slowing them down and triggering a partial task switch at the cortical level. The view of unconsciousness stimulates us to think about noticing further. For example, during the revision on Form, both the writers and evaluators, especially Chinese participants, notice Fa1, Fa2 and Fa3 very quickly on some easy and obvious grammatical mistakes without consciousness, which can be considered as unconscious noticing. From this phenomenon we can infer that there are indeed some unconscious noticing happening in the revising work of 173 L2 writing. It may come from the error-correcting habit formed for a long time since the beginning of L2 learning. However, this phenomenon can be left to be studied in the future. In a nutshell, psychology has amply demonstrated not only that subliminal perception exists but that a whole array of mental processes can be launched without consciousness (even though, in most cases, they do not run to full completion). Figure 8 An overview of unconscious operations in the human brain (Stanislas, 2014) Henri Poincare, in Science and Hypothesis (1902), anticipated the superiority of unconscious brute-force processing over slow conscious thinking: The subliminal self is in no way inferior to the conscious self; it is not purely automatic; it is capable of discernment; it has tact, delicacy; it knows how to choose, to divine. What do I say? It knows better how to divine than the conscious self, since it succeeds where that has failed. In a word, is not the subliminal self-superior to the conscious self? 174 But we should not get carried away. Some cognitive psychologists go as far as to propose that consciousness is a pure myth, a decorative but powerless feature, like frosting on a cake. All the mental operations that underlie our decisions and behavior, they claim, are accomplished unconsciously. In their view, our awareness is a mere bystander, a backseat driver that contemplates the brain’s unconscious accomplishments but lacks effective powers of its own. We can explain this phenomenon from the brain web. Since the brain generate synchronized neuronal oscillations, synchrony facilitates the transmission of information. Within the vast neuronal forests of the cortex, with their millions of cells discharging at random, it would be easy to lose track of a small assembly of active neurons. If they shout in unison, however, their voice is much more likely to be heard and relayed. Excitatory neurons often orchestrate their discharges in order to broadcast a significant message. In essence, synchrony opens up a channel of communication between distant neurons. Neurons that oscillate together share windows of opportunity during which they are all ready to receive signals from one another. The synchrony that we researchers observe in our macroscopic recordings may indicate that, at the microscopic scale, thousands of neurons are exchanging information. What may be particularly significant for conscious experience are instances when such exchanges occur not only between two local regions but across many distant regions of the cortex, thus forming a coherent brain-scale assembly. In agreement with this idea, several teams have observed that the massive synchronization of electromagnetic signals across the cortex constitutes a 175 fourth signature of conscious perception. Once again the effect occurs primarily within a late time window: about 300 milliseconds after an image appears, many distant electrodes start to synchronize—but only if the image is consciously perceived. Figure 9 Brain web (Stanislas, 2014) Invisible images create only a temporary synchrony, spatially restricted to the back of the brain, where operations unfold without awareness. Conscious perception, by contrast, involves long-distance communication and a massive exchange of reciprocal signals that has been termed a “brain web”. The frequency at which this brain web is established varies across studies, but it typically occurs in the lower frequencies of the beta band (13-30 hertz) or the theta band (3-8 hertz). Presumably these slow carrier frequencies are the most convenient for bridging over the significant delays that are involved in transmitting information across distances of several centimeters. 5.5 Chapter summary In this chapter, we have studied noticing from four aspects: the analysis of 176 noticing in L2 writing, aspects of noticing in L1 and L2 writings, influence of L2 proficiency on noticing and the neural basis of noticing in the brain. In Japanese, the participants still like to put the noticing on Meaning in the L2 writing and revising processes. In Chinese, the participants with higher level of L2 proficiency notice both Meaning and Form. L2 proficiency influences the degree of consciousness in noticing between Form and Meaning. Those who have high level of L2 proficiency also have high ability of automatic cognition. The proportion of automatic writing scripts in low level writers is much lower than high level writers. Besides conscious noticing, there is also unconscious noticing happening in the brain. One phenomenon is the ability to control ourselves and inhibit our automatic responses. Another phenomenon shows that we can detect some of our errors without being conscious. In L2 writing, some revising work such as Fa1, Fa2, Fa3, demonstrate this phenomenon. From the above discussion, we can obtain some clues on the ways of teaching in L2 writing and the next chapter will explore the teaching methods in detail, especially how the teachers actually teach, and learn to teach L2 writing in the real classrooms. 177 Chapter 6 Enlightenment on Teaching L2 Writing 6.1 Discussion on revision—written feedback In this experiment, noticing has been explored most in the revising process. In the writing theory, revision equals to feedback, which is an important phenomenon worth studying for teaching L2 writing. Feedback can be divided into corrective feedback and non-corrective feedback (Lyster and Ranta, 1997). As for the corrective feedback, there are two opposing views. Truscott (1996, 1999, 2004, 2007) insisted that corrective feedback was ineffective and should be dispersed because it took up some time and energy which should be thrown into the other more meaningful writing processes. However, Ferris (1999) indicated the limitation of Truscott and carried out a series of studies (Ferris, 1995, 1997; Ferris et al. 2000; Ferris and Helt 2000). The result showed that corrective feedback improved the correctness of language form which were supported by the investigated students and most scholars. Some scholars found that L2 writers really referred to the corrective feedback in the last composition given by the teacher when they wrote a new composition and feedback was useful to learn the regulated language form such as articles. Compared with Ferris’ view, few scholars (Kepner, 1991; Polio et al. 1998) supported Truscott’s view (1996). On the basis of the effective role of corrective feedback, many researchers compared the writing influence between direct and indirect feedback. Some research demonstrated that the indirect feedback took more effect on the development of L2 writing (Ferris et al. 2000; Ferris and Helt 2000; Ferris 178 2003) because the indirectness of feedback helped to push the students to pay more attention to the language form and guided them to participate in solving the problems (Ashwell, 2000; Ferris, 2003). Other research indicated that the direct feedback took more effect (Sheen, 2007; Bitchener, 2008; Bitchener and Knoch, 2008), which could give clear and obvious guide to the students’ composition and had benefit to those who couldn’t correct the mistakes by themselves. Feedback policies should be used variously. For some students with good L2 proficiency, the teacher should mainly use the indirect feedback, focusing on the content. On one hand, these students have higher activeness. They can understand the teacher’s clue easily and can finish correction through looking for the related materials. On the other hand, their L2 proficiency determines their high noticing to the effectiveness of the whole composition. Whether the paragraph can move the readers and be persuasive are what they mainly consider. The teacher’s evaluation and advice to the content is useful to the development of students’ thought. To the students with low proficiency, the direct feedback is superior to the indirect feedback. The content couldn’t be considered as the emphasis of evaluation. The L2 proficiency of these students determines their little possibility of effective self-correction. So the direct feedback can improve the correcting efficiency, make the students receive the feedback and realize the mistakes through comparing the interlanguage and target language. To the types of mistakes, for the more easily corrected mistakes or tied to 179 some language regulations, such as wrong match of phrases, grammatical mistakes and so on, the teacher should consider using the indirect feedback which helps to intrigue the students’ activeness of solving the problems, pushing them to correct some complex mistakes by themselves through looking into the reference materials. And the direct feedback is superior to indirect feedback. The teacher could consider the concrete mistakes, use the feedback policy of combining direct and indirect feedback appropriately. When the teacher chose the indirect feedback, he could use the mistaken code carefully, and positive and encouraging evaluation would be concerned. Writing advice will become an indispensable part of written feedback, combining concrete and general information. On one hand, the teacher’s advice is closely related to the composition itself with the form of neutral evaluation, concerning on the concrete thought, structure and language. On the other hand, the teacher could also supply the studying advice and guidance applied more broadly to improve the students’ writing level in order to make great progress in the next English writing. The teacher can express his view and comment (neutral evaluation) at the end of the composition according to the students’ view on the topic. The calligraphy and expression of evaluation could be considered according to the writers’ acceptable ability. If the students could not understand the teacher’s advice because of bad handwriting or difficult expression, they would not reach the best effect of feedback which may take some bad effect on correction. Besides, another kind of feedback, which also happens very frequently in L2 writing, should be mentioned—peer feedback. Under the confining 180 condition of this experiment, peer feedback has not been utilized and explained. Peer feedback is a good way to emancipate from the instructional monopoly of the teacher’s translation and to reinforce communication-oriented instruction instead of the silence-dominated one-way instruction by an older and more experienced teacher in the exclusive lecture style in the writing classes. There are three principles for peer feedback: (1) Intermediate drafts are in themselves more useful than completely corrected final drafts in facilitating the students’ writing ability (Krashen, 1984; Hillocks, 1986). (2) Peer feedback includes peer revision and subsequent peer editing. Revision should be first concerned with major or text-level correction for smooth organizational development, followed by the minor or mechanical correction. (3) With each round of revision, the process-centered and destination-conscious, cooperative interaction will make the worksheet more useful. During the peer feedback, the instructor should make his or her contribution on using a different standard from that taken for granted before, that is, a receptive one as a coordinator, commentator, or facilitator instead of an absolute judge in order to facilitate the students’ writing ability in reviewing their drafts (Raimes, 1986; Leki, 1990). More precisely a teacher’s participation in the peer revision is to respond as a reader, one of the audience, “not as a grammarian or a grade-giver (Keh, 1990, p.301)”. 6.2 Theories of teaching L2 writing Numerous theories of teaching L2 writing have appeared in the 181 professional literature over the past four decades (Cumming, 2001; Grabe and Kaplan, 1996; Hyland, 2003; Matsuda, 2003). Each theory has a distinctive focus, emphasizing either language structures, creative expression, composing processes, content, genres or contexts of writing. In the 1950s and 1960s, language teachers often used writing as a vehicle for language practice. Current-traditional rhetoric was, and in some situations still remains, one of the main teaching methods, emphasizing correct usage, grammar, and rhetorical patterns. In the 1970s, inspired by research and educators’ analyses, theories about L2 writing instruction started to shift from a focus on structures of language and of written texts towards an emphasis on the processes of composing. Theories about the processes of writing developed in three main strands: the expressive view, the cognitive view and the social view. The expressive view regarded writing as a form of communicating personal ideas that was progressively learnt, not taught, so rather than focusing narrowly on the correct grammar and usage, writers were encouraged to discover their own ideas while they compose. The cognitive view regarded writing as a “non-linear, exploratory, and generative process whereby writers discover and reformulate their ideas as they attempt to approximate meaning” (Zamel, 1983, p.165). From a cognitive view, learning to write focused on developing an efficient and effective composing process. The social view regarded writing as the situated acts that occured within particular situations and groups of people, so learning to write was a process of socializing into an academic or other specialized community. 182 Much discussion has focused on these different theories and their implications for students’ L2 writing, but scant attention has been given to how teachers actually teach, and learn to teach L2 writing in the real classrooms (Hirvela and Belcher, 2007; Leki, Cumming and Silva, 2008). There is a glaring gap between theories of writing instruction and actual practices of classroom teaching (Hedgcock, 2010; Zhu, 2010). Theory is mainly seen to be the work of scholars and empirical researchers, whereas practice is the work of teachers, many of whom may deride theory as irrelevant to their classrooms (Clarke,1994; Hedgcock, 2010). Nonetheless, teachers are one of the most available supports that students can seek in their process of learning to write. In the context of English as a second language (ESL), writing abilities in English are recognized as decisive for students in performing academic writing tasks at universities or college and in professional or vocational writing at work (Grabe and Kaplan, 1996; Leki, et al., 2008). In many context of English as a foreign language (EFL), writing abilities in English are often required not only at the college and university level but also in the secondary schools for various entrance exams or qualifications. Grabe and Kaplan (1996, p.6) stated that “writing abilities are not naturally acquired” but “culturally transmitted in every generation, whether in schools or in other assisting environments.” To meet their writing demands, students definitely need good writing instruction, for which qualified and experienced writing teachers are necessary. 183 6.3 Practices of teaching L2 writing Based on the above theories, the teachers’ practices of teaching L2 writing are usually divided into three aspects.3 6.3.1 Practice under the current-traditional rhetoric view Teachers with this kind of view believe that accuracy and appropriateness are highly valued as indicators of a person’s education among colleagues. Moreover, due to the shortage of pedagogical materials, teachers at that time emphasize imitation and repetition in English learning, including learning to write. Writing is integrated into reading courses to help the students read and grasp vocabulary and grammar. They also believe that the teaching method comes from their instincts and experiences of learning to write in their first language. 6.3.2 Practice under the expressive view Teachers with this kind of view perceive that teachers should encourage students to discover their own ideas at the prewriting stage and that writing is learnt rather than taught, echoing principles of the expressive view of writing. A teacher’s responsibility is to guide the students’ learning, inspiring the students to explore further themselves. The students benefit more from extensive reading than from classroom instruction on the use of formulaic language or rhetorical patterns. 3 Luxin, Y. & Shaofen, G. Beliefs and practices of Chinese university teachers in EFL writing instruction. Language, Culture and Curriculum, Vol. 26, No 2, 128-145, 2013 184 6.3.3 Practice under the mixture of product-and process-oriented writing instruction Under this view, the teachers usually mix product and process pedagogy in their teaching of writing. On the one hand, they follow the arrangement of genres (e.g. narration, description, exposition and argumentation) and of rhetorical patterns (e.g. exemplification, classification, definition, comparison and contrast) that appear in the in-house textbooks. On the one hand, they follow the process-oriented methods in their teaching, starting with explanation of formulaic patterns and prewriting, then first drafts, followed by peer evaluation and teacher’s feedback, and then second drafts. 6.4 Methods of teaching L2 writing From this writing experiment, we believe that writing products and processes should be integrated rather than separated in teaching, and sufficient reading input is essential for learning to write. Teachers should regard their teaching methods as a mixture of product and process orientations to writing. However, they may have different emphasis in conceptualizing their teaching methods. Some may stress the importance of the quality of written products in teaching. Some may value a balance between products and processes in teaching. Some may believe that writing instruction should first focus on the process of writing, particularly to help students with developing ideas at the prewriting stage, and then should focus on the language use and rhetorical patterns at the revision stage. 185 The teacher’s role can be reflected from three methods. The first method is that the teachers teach and require the students to follow the rules in English at the early stages. The students benefit from learning language forms because these forms enable them to generate and express ideas when successfully appropriated. The second method is that in order to write well, students need to have formed the “good writing habits” such as considering audience and purpose. Before becoming independent writers, students need a teacher’s guidance and support to get rid of “bad writing habits” they had formed in high school and “to offer them more opportunities to change their previous perceptions about writing”. The third method is that the students take the responsibility for their own learning, and the teachers set up tasks to stretch the students’ potential. Writing ability is not acquired through teaching but is learnt from abundant reading. Teachers need to encourage students to read, think, and write as well as to give responses at the stage of prewriting. In all, during the teaching process of L2 writing, the teacher can make some comprehensive ways of the above methods, or utilize the different teaching methods under the different teaching contexts in order to bring about a striking teaching effect. 6.5 Future objective Under the above teaching methods, both Japanese and Chinese L2 writers may improve their L2 writing abilities quickly. For the Japanese L2 writers, the teacher may throw much energy into the pre-writing period; guiding them to do 186 the brain-storming work as much as possible, since they already take the notice of Meaning in L2 writing. However, for the Chinese L2 writers, the teacher should guide the students to form the good writing habit first, helping them transfer noticing from Form to Meaning. In all, the future objective is to improve the students’ L2 writing ability from argumentative writing to other styles, including narration, exposition and description. 6.6 Chapter summary This chapter introduces some methods of teaching L2 writing as well as the correspondent theories. Through the detailed introduction, we can understand that teaching is not only intellectual in nature, but necessarily involves a moral dimension not captured in much other research on the teaching writing or other aspects of language education. A teacher’s willingness to reflect, and to find alternative ways to make teaching effective, depends critically on the extent of their dedication to their teaching. Moral dimensions of responsibility and commitment play a decisive role in teaching practices, as “morality is integral to the whole process of teaching and learning” (Wylie, 2005, p.16) and “learning requires a personal relationship” like pastoral care (Wilson, 1997, p.5). Teacher education and development cannot afford to miss this fundamental point, though further research is needed to examine precisely how morals and values actually influence the teaching and learning of L2 writing. 187 In a word, teaching L2 writing is a decision-rich, intellectual, social, and moral enterprise, but above all it is an individual and highly personal undertaking (Clarke, 1994). Helping writing teachers engage with and challenge their theories and bring improvement to their practices through ongoing critical reflection should be the core concern of education for writing teachers. 188 Chapter 7 Findings, Implications, Limitations and Suggestions 7.1 Major findings The major findings of this study emerge from quantitative analyses of think-aloud protocols and qualitative analyses. Two general findings are revealed: First, with the development of cognitive science, an increasing number of researchers have shown great interest in the psychological process of language acquisition which are divided into three stages: attention, consciousness and noticing (Dörnyei, 2009). Up until now, researchers have made great progress in the study of attention and consciousness, with much less research related to noticing as being described in Chapter One. Therefore, in this study, noticing is further explored in order to grasp a complete picture of psychological process of language acquisition and its corresponding brain function. Second, the aspects of noticing have been a neglected area of investigation in the studies of the L2 writing process. This dissertation investigates the revising processes of L1 and L2 writings to explore the aspects of noticing, from which we can get some enlightenment on improving L2 writing competency. The specific findings are listed as follows: (1) Findings on the nature of noticing: After consciousness, through Working Memory, noticing happens. And noticing usually appears when the brain works under the following several situations: The whole image was absorbed in the brain, then after getting the 189 whole image, the brain makes some classifications and arrange the sequences. Next, the spatial relationship will be grasped, the ways will be understood, the regulations will be found and some other situations may also exist. During the above working processes in the brain, noticing happens in the way of intuition, arranging the information, finding the rules and correcting the errors. (2) Findings on the aspects of noticing: For the self-revision, the Japanese students’ noticing to Meaning ranks the first in both L1 and L2 writings, during which, the participants notice more on the sentence processing in L1 writing while notice more on the word processing in L2 writing. While the Chinese students notice Meaning first in L1 writing and notice the same between Meaning and Form in L2 writing. For the adviser revision, both the Japanese and Chinese evaluators give some general suggestions about Meaning without any comment on the use of Form. In L2 writing, the evaluator notices not only the sentence and word processing in the revising process of Form but also the idea, the whole structure and the process of argumentation in the revising process of Meaning, like that in L1 writing. In Japanese, L2 proficiency is a very important element to improve the ability of noticing. The participants with the highest and lowest L2 proficiency usually notice Meaning the most while those who have the middle level of L2 proficiency are involved in the unceasing converting noticing between Form and Meaning. In Chinese, there is no clear regularity of noticing in L2 writing. (3) Findings on the neural basis of brain: Noticing in both L1 and L2 writings can activate language processing in 190 both the cerebrum and the cerebellum. Noticing in L1 writing may only activate the semantic processing while noticing in L2 writing may activate the syntactic processing in the cerebrum first, then the semantic processing in the cerebrum, and lastly the semantic process in the cerebellum. There are also unconscious noticing happening in the brain. One phenomenon is the ability to control the brain and inhibit its automatic responses. Another one is to detect some of errors without being conscious. In L2 writing, some revising work such as Fa1, Fa2, Fa3, demonstrate this phenomenon. In a nutshell, psychology has amply demonstrated not only that subliminal perception exists but that a whole array of mental processes can be launched without consciousness. 7.2 Implications 7.2.1 Theoretical implications There are three facets of theoretical implications: 1) the study broadens the scope of research on noticing in SLA; 2) it necessitates the urge for a reexamination of the existing theories of writing. 3) It improves the understanding of theories of teaching L2 writing. 7.2.1.1 Broadening the scope of study on noticing in SLA Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis (1995, 2001) was the first psychologically orientated theory that succeeded in achieving mainstream status in SLA research. The heart of the noticing hypothesis was the claim that only those parts of the input that the learner noticed actually became available for intake 191 and effective processing. The great popularity of the noticing idea was due to the fact that it addressed two fundamental issues on the SLA process. Firstly, explicit and conscious learning played an important role in the SLA process, which totally rejected Krashen’s implicit-only view. The noticing hypothesis stated that effective implicit learning could not occur without explicitly creating the initial mental representation of a new stimulus. While some Japanese scholars (Shirahata, 1999; Ikari, 2009; etc) put forward different views on noticing. They believed that noticing was not equal to attention nor did it belong to a part of attention. Attention was a preparatory stage of consciousness, in which the competitive input was selected and paid attention to and then wait to be processed in consciousness. On the other hand, noticing was not a simple process of paying attention to the input, but a much more complicated cognitive process. It was to achieve a final adjustment of language. This adjustment led to reduce the interference of L1 on L2 and produce L2 output as accurately and naturally as possible. It usually involved improving pronunciation and intonation, modifying spellings and grammatical mistakes, adjusting and integrating sentence structures and meanings, reorganizing paragraphs and even the whole content. 7.2.1.2 Urging for a reexamination of the existing theories of writing Classical theories of writing (Flower and Hayes, 1981; Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1987; Kellogg, 1996) mainly related specifically to L1 writing but also adopted by L2 writing research, proposed that writing was a top-down problem-solving process in which various strategies were used to work out 192 what one wanted to achieve and how to do it step by step by simplifying major problems into simpler subprocesses. However, some researchers argued that writing was not only a top-down but also a bottom-up process, in which the text was generated from knowledge constituting. Yet, most empirical studies in both L1 and L2 were carried out under the framework of the classical models and very few had attempted to investigate the fundamental nature of writing. The present study has tried to investigate the writing process from the perspective of noticing in the working memory. The writers exert different aspects of noticing to different aspects of writing. Specifically speaking, writers tend to use deeper levels of consciousness in noticing in both L1 and L2 writings. In all, the present study contributes to the extent theories of writing by showing empirically that writing is more than problem-solving in nature. This contribution calls for more research as to the assumed nature of writing claimed by some models. 7.2.1.3 Improving the understanding of theories of teaching L2 writing Theories about the processes of writing developed in three main strands: the expressive view, the cognitive view, and the social view. The expressive view regarded writing as a form of communicating personal ideas that was progressively learnt, not taught, so rather than focusing narrowly on correct grammar and usage, writers were encouraged to discover their own ideas while they composed. The cognitive view regarded writing as a “non-linear, exploratory, and generative process whereby writers discovered and reformulated their ideas as they attempted to approximate meaning” 193 (Zamel, 1983, p.165). From a cognitive view, learning to write focused on developing an efficient and effective composing process. The social view regarded writing as situated acts that occured within particular situations and groups of people, so learning to write was a process of socializing into an academic or other specialized community. 7.2.2 Pedagogical implications 7.2.2.1 Instruction in pre-writing period The teacher should guide the students to form good writing habits such as considering audience and purpose. Before becoming independent writers, students need to get rid of bad writing habits they had formed in high school and to change their previous perceptions about writing. Furthermore, the students should take the responsibility for their own learning, and the teachers need to set up tasks to stretch students’ potential. Writing ability is not acquired through teaching but is learnt from abundant reading. Teachers need to encourage students to read, think, and write as well as to give responses at the stage of prewriting. 7.2.2.2 Individual diagnosis and intervention in developing L2 writing Several studies (Whalen, Menart, 1995) have suggested the need for individual diagnosis and intervention in developing L2 writing competency. Therefore, L2 writing instruction should base all intervention on an initial diagnosis of each student writer’s strengths and weaknesses not only from their writing products but also from the writing process. By identifying the student writer’s individual writing process, especially their noticing competency, 194 instructional intervention can build on existing competencies to develop more sophisticated writing applications. 7.2.2.3 Meta-knowledge Student writers can also benefit from meta-knowledge of the highly complex writing process by raising consciousness and promoting noticing. Teachers can help them to develop meta-knowledge of their own writing process and noticing behaviors which they might otherwise miss and also to compare what they attend to in the writing process with what they produce. The student writers will understand that they do not learn English writing in an isolated state but that they will make more progress through conscious awareness of their own L2 proficiency, Chinese/Japanese writing ability and educational experience as factors influencing the development of academic writing in an L2. 7.2.2.4 Different classroom activities To raise the level of noticing in the L2 student writer’s own writing process, the teacher can organize different activities, such as peer discussion, individual, pair or group think-aloud tasks and revision, and comparing their own writing processes in L1 and L2. Writing methods such as think-aloud proposed by many scholars (Leow, 1997; Swain, 2006) should be looked upon as effective way in promoting noticing significance in L2 writing. It is of great importance for the teacher to direct their students to notice certain areas according to their specific needs. For instance, writers with advanced L2 proficiency may attend to the lexical meanings rather than formal features of a 195 language. Writers with good Japanese/Chinese writing competency can be guided to consciously compare their own writing processes in Japanese/Chinese and English, and as a result, to evaluate their own weakness in English writing and understand how they can transfer their writing competence in Japanese/Chinese to their written English. 7.2.2.5 Feedback Besides, in L2 writing research, written feedback has been an outstanding topic and was considered very important by some researchers (Suigita, 2006; Bitchener and Knoch, 2009). Long (1996) thought that feedback could improve the language development of learners together with the learners’ inner elements. Teacher’s written feedback plays a positive part in improving students’ L2 writing. Corrective feedback helps to upgrade the correctness of written language. Non-corrective feedback (evaluation) can not only improve the students’ language applying ability but also guide the students to notice the whole effect of paragraph so as to improve the whole quality of composition. The research supplies a new clue about how to make the teacher’s written feedback better. In all, the teacher should notice the influence of different kinds of written feedback closely and supplies the feedback freely with the concrete situation of students’ compositions, furthermore, get the best effect of feedback. 7.3 Limitations Some caution needs to be made about the results of this study because of 196 the small population investigated in the writing process and only tendencies instead of statistical significance in some major sections of findings obtained. The first limitation is that the students are assumed to have the same L1 competence. In fact, it is still possible that they may have the different L1 competence. Therefore, the findings of the present study should not be applied to the whole population of English majors in Japan and China. Secondly, the entire population under the present study represents the tip of Japanese and Chinese English learner population. Therefore, whether the findings are applicable or generalizable to the true majority of Japanese and Chinese English learner population needs more empirical research. The third limitation is that the study addresses the aspects of noticing in the central executive only in the process of argumentative writing, leaving investigation in other types of writing tasks, such as narration, description, and exposition untouched. Therefore, the findings of the present study cannot be generalized to other types of writing. 7.4 Suggestions for future research The present study investigates the noticing happening in L1 and L2 writing processes. Due to the qualitative nature of the process-oriented design of the study, the findings are only tentative and not generalizable to other subjects beyond the study scope. Therefore, its results should be reexamined and complemented by future research for a better understanding of the nature of writing from the perspective of noticing. 197 First, this study investigates the L2 writers with different L2 proficiency levels. While future research focusing on the same group of writers’ L2 proficiency development and L2 writing instruction over time should be of great value to examine how their writing competencies advance over time. Second, an important way used in this study is the bidirectional transfer L1 and L2 revising competencies. Since the study of it is superficial and descriptive, future research may produce more valuable outcomes if it is used to investigate the possibility of bi-directional transfer of composing competence and some possible factors, including amount and nature of prior writing experience and instruction in L1 and L2, personal factors, such as attitude, motivation, and perceptions of L1 and L2 writings. Third, future research is to replicate the present study with participant factors, such as age, gender, personality, motivation and contextual factors such as an experiment context with no time limit or a classroom context where writing is a process of learning. For example, it can be anticipated that for young L2 writers whose L1 writing competency is still in progress, the degree of noticing may also be different from adult L2 writers. Meanwhile, future research is also to practice the present study in the writing class as much as possible, testifying its feasibility and finding the deficiency to improve this theory and method. Fourth, although the study of neural basis of conscious noticing in the brain has been made great progress, unconscious noticing happening in the brain, especially in the writing process should be explored further. 198 7.5 Chapter summary In this chapter, the major findings of the present study are summarized with a general description. Next, the theoretical and pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed. Finally, the limitations of the study and a recommendation for future research are pointed out. 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To what extent do you think this is a positive or negative development? Please write an article to express your opinion. The title can be decided by yourself. Writing length: around 200 words. Writing time: 30 minutes. Revising time: 15 minutes 232 英語作文（第二稿） Recently, it is possible to go shopping, work and communicate via the Internet without face-to-face contact with one another. To what extent do you think this is a positive or negative development? Please write an article to express your opinion. The title can be decided by yourself. Writing length: around 200 words. Writing time: 30 minutes 233 Appendix B Writing Prompts (Chinese) 汉语作文 (第一稿) 有人认为，上大学是年轻人未来事业发展的最好准备方法。也有些人 认为年轻人应该尽早离开学校，积累工作经验，从而更好的发展事业。请 写一篇文章评论这两种观点，并提出你的看法，题目自定。字数：300 字。 写作时间：20 分钟。修改时间：10 分钟 234 汉语作文 (第二稿) 有人认为，上大学是年轻人未来事业发展的最好准备方法。也有些人 认为年轻人应该尽早离开学校，积累工作经验，从而更好的发展事业。请 写一篇文章评论这两种观点，并提出你的看法，题目自定。字数：300 字。 写作时间：20 分钟。 235 英语作文（第一稿） Recently, it is possible to go shopping, work and communicate via the Internet without face-to-face contact with one another. To what extent do you think this is a positive or negative development? Please write an article to express your opinion. The title can be decided by yourself. Writing length: around 200 words. Writing time: 30 minutes. Revising time: 15 minutes 236 英语作文（第二稿） Recently, it is possible to go shopping, work and communicate via the Internet without face-to-face contact with one another. To what extent do you think this is a positive or negative development? Please write an article to express your opinion. The title can be decided by yourself. Writing length: around 200 words. Writing time: 30 minutes 237 Appendix C Writing Scripts (Japanese) 238 239 240 241 Appendix D Writing Scripts (Chinese) 242 243 244 245