RECONCEPTUALISING NOTICING IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: TASK RELEVANCE, EFFORT, AND EVIDENTIAL LIMITS
Vol.12, Issue 1, 2026, pp. 133-149 Full text: PDF . HTML
DOI: https://doi.org/10.33919/esnbu.26.1.9
Web of Science: [WOS=]
Author:
Stanislav Bogdanov https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7144-1044
Affiliation: New Bulgarian University, Sofia, Bulgaria 002qhr126
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.
Keywords: Noticing Hypothesis, second language acquisition, attention, task relevance, processing effort, communicative processing, inferential limits
Article history:
Submitted: 28 January 2026
Reviewed: 12 March 2026
Accepted: 15 May 2026
Published: 22 June 2026
Citation (APA):
Bogdanov, S. (2026). Reconceptualising Noticing in Second Language Acquisition: Task relevance, effort, and evidential limits. English Studies at NBU, 12(1), 133-149. https://doi.org/10.33919/esnbu.26.1.9
Copyright © 2026 Stanislav Bogdanov
This is an Open Access article published and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Handling Editor: Boris Naimushin, New Bulgarian University
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