We are introduced to two forms of knowledge which are the Declarative (or explicit) knowledge which is the knowledge about something and underlies learning and storage of facts; and the procedural (or implicit) knowledge which is knowing how to do something hence relating to motor and cognitive skills that involve sequencing information and is usually conscious. Though both knowledge forms are part of the long term memory yet they are a different. Consequently a dilemma rose on how to connect these two knowledge forms in order for language learners to achieve automaticity in language acquisition/learning.
Smith then introduced what he call as Noticing Hypothesis - that is a language student, must be aware first of a certain grammar point/language feature and then through involvement, repeated noticing and continued awareness, the grammar point will eventually become a part of his/her procedural knowledge.
Let me take for example a student who already has an initial knowledge on how and when to use simple present tenses. It is only through follow-ups by the teachers (or other intermediaries )through their communicative activities like letting her write some past events or experiences, watching a movie and retell what had happened, read some narrative events or retell a story, that the student’s knowledge about simple present tenses will retain in her cognition and will eventually become a part of her procedural memory because the student already has the initial knowledge and her regular noticing of such tenses in the said activities help her to achieve automaticity. If the student’s exposure to that knowledge stops as the bell rang, what she learned will be like a junk food – masticated, digested and deposited without leaving any nutrient. Synonymous to language learning, the student’s knowledge will remain in the declarative memory and since it is a limited storage, the initial knowledge will be gradually deleted as new input comes in.
Another implication for Smiths hypothesis is for educators to provide an lesson procedures and assessment that do not only focus to one language lesson; that is, integrated-item procedures, for it is found out in parallel processing - a special model of cognition, that many processes occur simultaneously and are interconnected, forming neural networks of various levels of activation depending on what is being processed.
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