Noticing: Its Impact on Adult Users of English in a Non-Native Context

This paper presents one perspective of the conversation on noticing. It investigates the noticing experience of adult users of English in a non-native context. The respondents were forty final-year undergraduate students majoring in Accounting in a public tertiary institution. A questionnaire, a short-written test, and post-test verbal report sessions were used to source empirical data to probe the respondents' own noticing experience of ten linguistic features. Values were generated to approximate and represent the respondents' noticing experience, implicit knowledge, and their explicit knowledge of the linguistic features investigated. The study reveals that adult users of English in second language contexts may possess implicit knowledge of linguistic features they had not previously noticed, but they need to notice in order to have explicit knowledge of linguistic features. The study concludes that second language learners usually learn what they have first noticed, and that which has been noticed usually results in learning.