The Role of Models and Note-taking in Noticing and Interlanguage Development

The present study investigated the process of learners noticing and the role of model texts in their interlanguage development. In particular, it was intended to explore how the noticing function of model texts affects revisions in L2 writing. Moreover the study explored what are the effects of note-taking as a measure of noticing. The participants were 83 Korean EFL college students at a low proficiency level who were involved in a three-staged picture description task. They were asked to give a written picture description (Stage 1), to compare their written texts with two native-speaker models (Stage 2), and to attempt subsequent revisions (Stage 3). At Stage 2, the participants were assigned to engage in two different activities (i.e., note-taking and underlining). The results revealed that the participants mostly noticed problematic linguistic features in both lexical and content categories initially, which accounted for a great majority of overt problematic features, and they subsequently found solutions to the problems and applied them to their revisions. Model texts were found to serve as a good example of native writing for low proficiency learners and note-taking was used as found to be an effective way to promote their noticing. Therefore, L2 learners could take advantage of writing conditions by comparing their writing with model texts provided as feedback along with think-aloud activities such as combined with note-taking. Based on the results, limitations of the study and pedagogical implications were provided.