Reconceptualising Noticing in second language acquisition: Task relevance, effort, and evidential limits
Reconceptualising Noticing in second language acquisition: Task relevance, effort, and evidential limits

Summary/Abstract: Noticing in second language acquisition (SLA) research is routinely invoked as a necessary condition for learning, yet its conceptual status remains unstable, and its empirical operationalisation persistently contested. Across the literature, noticing has been variously equated with awareness, selective attention, discrepancy detection, depth of processing, intake, or learning itself - often without reconciliation. This article argues that the enduring difficulty of measuring noticing reflects a failure of definition rather than a lack of methodological sophistication. Building on communicative, interactionist, and cognitive perspectives, it advances a process-oriented reconceptualization of noticing as a functional boundary within ongoing communicative activity. Under this account, noticing marks the point at which automatic, predictive processing becomes insufficient for task continuation and processing effort must be renegotiated under task-relevant uncertainty. Noticing is thus treated as relational, transient, and process-internal, rather than as a directly observable mental state. The article shows how this reconceptualization clarifies longstanding evidential ambiguities and outlines its implications for theory and research across modalities in SLA.

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