An Overview of ‘Attention’ According to Van Lier
[1]
Mehrdad Rezaee, Department of Foreign Languages, Central Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran.
[2]
Majid Farahian, Department of ELT, College of Literature and Humanities, Kermanshah Branch, Islamic Azad University, Kermanshah, Iran.
In this paper, the authors have used different definitions of ‘attention’ from the viewpoint of different scholars each of whom sees it from a certain perspective, emphasizing one aspect of it. Meanwhile, the application of attention in SLA is studied. In so doing, the idea proposed by Krashen (incidental learning) is rejected which claimed that one can learn well even without paying attention (the issue of language acquisition), but later on, it was mentioned that since we have different levels of learning, it is not always necessary to have attention for learning; however, the type of learning without attention would not be different from the time that the person learns by paying attention. So, attention determines deep or shallow learning.
Attention, SLA, Incidental Learning, Awareness, Noticing
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