Noticing

Different people have different ways of learning new language, depending on their surroundings and preferences. In EFL setting where English is rarely used to communicate in everyday life, students have normally no options but rely on the grammar taught in class. At least, my case has been that way. For example, when I wanted to say that my whole day was spent on house chore yesterday, I found myself too much obsessive to rules of English that I came up with only one answer:"I spent much time doing dishes and cleaning my house yesterday", which I had been taught at school years ago. That is, the forms that I'd got long ago keep hindering me from being flexible in conveying my messages or meaning to others. If I have no forms or structures to be used to communicate, then, I used to be speechless or sounding very awkward because my words were forced to come out from a very small box of little knowledge of grammar. I have not tried to look out of the box. It was because sticking to it seemed to me the only way leading to the ultimate goal-fluency.

It was not long before I realized that I was wrong. At the early time of learning English, I wasn't interested in listening to others' English because I was too much self-concentrated to make sentences according to rules. One day I accidentally noticed there are some verbs frequently used by native speakers while Korean English learners tend to borrow a bunch of verbs to describe their thoughts. In addition, as my case, some Korean appear to be bound by some rules(or forms).

The reason I am writing about this is to highlight the important roles of noticing to move my English forward a little bit. Noticing differences has a crucial role to play in improving my English. It helps me to figure out what aspects should be corrected or made up to be more native like. As some research in SLA have suggested, noticing seems to be the starting point or the accelerator for learners to get there sooner than otherwise.